The Drowning of a Goldfish — Lidmila Sovakova

The narrator is a spunky young woman striving to escape from the social customs and cultural restraints that have spanned three political regimes: in a privileged childhood spent in the Czechoslovakian countryside prior to World War II, as a schoolgirl during the Nazi occupation, and as an adolescent and young adult witnessing the diminishing promise of communist rule.

“Lovingly conveys fleeting moments of a small child's world in pre-World War II Czechoslovakia, and later on the drab world of Stalinist Eastern Europe.” -- Los Angeles Times

Lidmila Sovakova was born in Prague, where she lived until emigrating, in 1970, to England and then Germany -- eventually settling in Paris in 1982. Multilingual, Lidmila received MA's in Russian, Czech, and French at Charles University in Prague, a diploma of English language and literature from the University of Cambridge, England, and doctorat d'etat in French literature in France. She is the author of ten novels in addition to The Drowning of a Goldfish.