An immensely moving, powerfully romantic novel about the vagaries of love and the legacy of war, The Visible World is narrated by the American-born son of Czech immigrants. His New York childhood, lived in a boisterous community of the displaced, is suffused with stories: fragments of European history, Czech fairy tales, and family secrets gleaned from overheard conversations. Central in his young imagination is the heroic account of the seven Czech parachutists who, in 1942, assassinated a high-ranking Nazi. Yet one essential story has always evaded him: his mother's. He suspects she had a great wartime love, the loss of which bred a sadness that slowly engulfed her. As an adult, the narrator travels to Prague, hoping to piece together her hidden past. "An eloquent testament to the power of storytelling." Kirkus Reviews “The sheer beauty of Mark Slouka's prose will draw comparisons to The English Patient." --Gary Shteyngart “It’s a triumph of story-telling…When has an elegy ever been so passionate, and historical moment so fully imagined?” -- Patricia Hampl “Sentence for sentence, word for word, Mark Slouka is one of our very best writers…a book that will last.” --Colum McCann "Mark Slouka has written a staggeringly beautiful novel. " --Daniel Alarcón “His novel’s power lives in the imaginative effort…to portray loss that is inherited…It’s a moving book.” –Richard Ford “[Slouka’s] style seamlessly merges a simple clarity with atmospheric lushness…[The Visible World] is this gifted writer’s most ambitious book.” --Stuart Dybek “Mark Slouka, with this novel, proves what an exceptional writer he is…a master of the American vernacular.” --Amit Chaudhuri "The Visible World is a beautifully written and thrilling poem about love…[It’s] a book you can’t put down.” --Richard Bausch “Rich with intelligence and poetic detail, The Visible World demonstrates why Mark Slouka is one of our finest contemporary novelists.” –Elizabeth Berg “A masterful work, it calls to mind the very finest Czech writers…I will re-read [it] again and again.” –Steve Yarbrough “Mark Slouka's elegant book keeps alive the essential mystery of life – love.” –Norman Manea "The Visible World reveals what is invisible within us. It's a pure pleasure to turn its pages." -- Ha Jin “The Visible World gains on itself from page to page…a genuine page turner.” --Sven Birkerts "Slouka's characters pop...and he demonstrates a shattering ability to capture humanity in its bleakest moments." Entertainment Weekly MARK SLOUKA is the author of the novels The Visible World , God’s Fool , named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle , the short story collection Lost Lake , a New York Times Notable Book, and the nonfiction work War of the Worlds . Three of his essays have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Essays , and his short story “The Woodcarvers Tale” won the National Magazine Award for fiction. 1 One night when I was young my mother walked out of the country bungalow we were staying in in the Poconos. I woke to hear my father pulling on his pants in the dark. It was very late, and the windows were open. The night was everywhere. Where was he going? I asked. “Go back to sleep,” he said. Mommy had gone for a walk. He would be right back, he said. But I started to cry because Mommy had never gone for a walk in the forest at night before and I had never woken to find my father pulling on his pants in the dark. I did not know this place, and the big windows of moonlight on the floor frightened me. In the end he told me to be brave and that he would be back before I knew it and pulled on his shoes and went searching for his wife. And found her, eventually, sitting against a tree or by the side of a pond in her tight-around-the-calf slacks and frayed tennis shoes, fifteen years too late. My mother knew a man during the war. Theirs was a love story, and like any good love story, it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake. It was all done by the fall of 1942. Earlier that year, in May, Czech partisans had assassinated Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, and the country had suffered through the predictable reprisals: interrogations, purges, mass executions. The partisans involved in the hit were killed on June 18. In December of that year my parents escaped occupied Czechoslovakia, crossing from Bohemia into Germany, from Germany to France, then south to Marseille, where my mother nearly died of scarlet fever before they could sail for England, and where my father and a small-time criminal named Vladek (who had befriended my father because they were both from Brno) sold silk and cigarette lighters to the whores whose establishments tended to be in the same neighborhoods and who always seemed to have a bit of money to spend. They were very young then. I have the documents from the years that followed: the foreign-worker cards and the soft, well-worn passports with their photos and their purple stamps, the i