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Tim O'Brien

677. Simon Mawer - Prague Spring


This was as good as the other 2 (665 & 666 above), and despite my negative comments about e-reading above, you can buy these without having to trek into a bookshop and then finding a space on your shelves to keep the book.

This was, as the title implies and quite literally, about the Prague spring and having been there 6 (I think) years ago, it brought it all back, although my main memory of Prague is the bitingly cold weather we had there, during that cold snap which brought snow and ice to the UK and closed German airports in 2013(?).

You could criticise this as being almost 2 books – one about a disparate pair of Oxford students who decide to bum around Europe in 1968 and end up fortuitously in Prague, and the other about an unpleasant young English diplomat on the Prague desk who ditches his middle class girlfriends, falls in love with a Czech girl and gets caught up in the movement for change.

Many paths collide, including some Czech radicals and a couple of Russian musical dissidents, not to mention The Moody Blues and a fictitious ( I think) American rock band whose Anthem I think called Crossing the Rubicon, gives a whole new meaning to that.

Very good, read it rather fast, as everything at the moment, but this will definitely get a re-read.


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