15 Best Czech Books: Fiction, Plays and Non-Fiction Picks
Inspired by the upcoming Nomad Book Club Prague retreat, I’ve compiled this suggested reading list of Czech books, Prague books and Czech writers to know.
The collection includes fiction set in Prague and Czechia, with a great deal of it wrestling with occupation, exile, and the absurdities of bureaucracy.
Alongside, there are non-fiction Czech books and memoirs that trace the country’s real history through the same turbulent century.
So much Czech literature carries a particular flavour of dark, absorbed humour (shall we say, Kafkaesque?) and I hope you enjoy perusing and reading these books about Czechia as much as I did:
14th – 17th november 2026
Prague Literary Retreat
Kafka, libraries, bookshops and a touch of the mysterious: explore Prague through its literary history with Nomad Book Club, from the Franz Kafka Museum and Strahov Library to literary cafés, creative writing and an evening at the theatre.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links and as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. This means I earn a small commission if you choose to make a purchase using a link, but at no cost to you. I’ve included Amazon links to each recommended book as well as Spotify, and Bookshop.org (US and UK) where available.
Fiction Books Set in Czechia
1. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
No list of Czech books can start anywhere else.
Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a “monstrous vermin” and spends the rest of the novella trying, and failing, to hold onto his old life as his family’s disgust curdles into indifference.
Kafka wrote in German, not Czech, and never set the story explicitly in Prague, but the city’s fingerprints are all over his work: the claustrophobia, the faceless bureaucracy, the sense of being watched by systems no one can quite name.
He spent virtually his entire life in the city, born into a German-speaking Jewish family under Austro-Hungarian rule, and his childhood home just off the Old Town Square is now a small museum dedicated to him.
2. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Translated by Michael Henry Heim
Kundera’s best-known novel follows two couples, and one small dog, through the philosophy of infidelity, freedom, and fate against the backdrop of the 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion that crushed it.
A womanising surgeon, the wife he can’t quite stay faithful to, his mistress, and the mistress’s own devoted lover circle each other across Prague and, eventually, exile in Switzerland.
Kundera uses their entanglements to pick apart questions of fidelity, memory, and political conviction, treating the novel as much as a vehicle for philosophical digression as a piece of storytelling.
It remains one of the defining fictional accounts of what the Soviet crackdown actually cost ordinary Czechs.
About the author: Milan Kundera, born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, was a student when the Czech Communist regime was established in 1948, and later worked as a labourer, jazz musician, and professor in Prague before his books were banned after the 1968 Soviet invasion. He settled in France in 1975 and wrote his later novels in French.
3. Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor
For a lighter, YA-fantasy entry, Laini Taylor’s Prague is a city of art students, hidden portals, and an ancient war between angels and chimaera.
Karou fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real, disappears on mysterious “errands,” and speaks many languages, not all of them human, and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that colour.
It’s a fun, atmospheric read for anyone who wants their Prague trip pre-loaded with a sense of hidden magic behind the Gothic spires.
About the author: Laini Taylor is a National Book Award finalist and Printz Honor author, best known for building richly imagined fantasy worlds on top of real cities, and Daughter of Smoke & Bone became a global sensation, later translated into dozens of languages.
4. The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek
Translated by Cecil Parrott, Original Illustrations by Josef Lada
Drunkard, malingerer, and possible genius, Švejk is the Czech everyman who survives the First World War not through heroism but through an endless, cheerful campaign of bumbling incompetence, subterfuge, and getting hopelessly drunk.
Hašek uses this one ordinary soldier, swallowed whole by imperial red tape, to skewer the entire absurd machinery of war with wicked wordplay and an anarchist’s contempt for authority.
It’s frequently cited as one of the funniest novels ever written, and its influence runs straight through to Catch-22 and beyond.
About the author: Jaroslav Hašek was a Czech humorist and satirist, journalist, and practical joker who wrote some 1,500 other stories besides Švejk, which has since been translated into sixty languages.
5. I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal
Translated by Paul Wilson
Ditie is a hugely ambitious, endlessly resourceful hotel waiter who rises from busboy to millionaire hotelier across the collapse of pre-war Czechoslovakia, the Nazi occupation, and the arrival of communism.
He gets his proudest career moment serving Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie rather than the English king the title promises, falls for a woman on the wrong side of the coming war, and eventually loses the fortune he spent the whole book chasing once the new regime takes hold.
It’s a picaresque, bittersweet novel, and arguably the best entry point into Hrabal’s strange, tender, very Czech sense of humour.
About the author: Bohumil Hrabal was born in 1914 in Brno-Zidenice, Moravia, and is considered, alongside Jaroslav Hašek and Karel Čapek, one of the greatest Czech writers of the twentieth century.
6. Prague Tales from the Little Quarter by Jan Neruda
Translated by Michael Henry Heim
Published in 1878 but looking back a few decades earlier, these vignettes capture Malá Strana, Prague’s Little Quarter, when it was still a quiet backwater of steep cobbled lanes and grand old houses, populated by shopkeepers, spinsters, and small-time dreamers rather than the tourists who fill it today.
Neruda’s warm, wry portraits of his neighbours, from anxious mothers to hopeful poets, earned him a reputation as something like the Czech Charles Dickens, and the neighbourhood he wrote about is still there, still barely changed, and still worth a slow afternoon’s wander.
About the author: Jan Neruda was a nineteenth-century Czech journalist, writer, and poet, and one of the most prominent figures of Czech realism; the poet Pablo Neruda later took his pen name in tribute to him.
7. Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař
Jakub Procházka is the first Czech astronaut, sent alone into deep space to investigate a mysterious cosmic cloud, all while his marriage and his country’s post-communist identity quietly fall apart behind him.
Along the way he meets and befriends a giant arachnid named Hanuš, and his motivation for space travel is rooted in a desire to escape his past, including a father who was a member of the secret police under the Communist regime.
It’s a strange, funny, surprisingly moving book, weaving Czech history, Cold War anxieties, and pure space-opera weirdness into something that feels genuinely its own.
The book was adapted into the Netflix film Spaceman, starring Adam Sandler.
About the author: Jaroslav Kalfař grew up in Prague before his family moved to the US when he was a teenager, and this was his debut novel, written in English.
8. HHhH by Laurent Binet
Translated by Sam Taylor
Part novel, part history, part memoir of the writing process itself, HHhH tells the true story of Operation Anthropoid: the 1942 mission in which two Czechoslovak parachutists were sent to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the brutal “Butcher of Prague.”
The book follows Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš from their escape from Nazi-occupied Prague, through recruitment by British intelligence and a harrowing parachute drop, to the attack itself and their own deaths in the basement of a Prague church.
Binet keeps interrupting his own narrative to agonise, in real time, over the ethics of fictionalising real people, which makes for one of the more unusual and compelling structures in modern historical fiction.
About the author: Laurent Binet is a French novelist whose debut, HHhH, won the Prix Goncourt du premier roman and became an international bestseller.
Honorable Mention
The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown
Series regular Robert Langdon heads to Prague to watch his partner, a scientist researching human consciousness, deliver a major lecture, only for a murder to derail everything and send her into hiding along with her unpublished research.
Formula aside, the novel doubles as an unusually detailed love letter to the city, working Prague’s castle, clock tower, and hidden bars into practically every chapter.
It certainly isn’t Czech literature in any traditional sense, and Brown’s prose divides readers as it always has, but it earns its place here for putting Prague’s astronomical clock, castle, and cobbled alleys in front of a genuinely enormous new audience.
There are now Prague guided tours themed around the book and its symbol-cracking puzzles:
Play
R.U.R. by Karel Čapek
Translated by Claudia Novack
Written in 1920 and premiered in Prague in 1921, R.U.R. introduced the word “robot” to the world.
Mass-produced as efficient labourers, Čapek’s Robots remember everything but think of nothing new, until the Utopian life they provide comes at the cost of humanity’s own will to reproduce, and the Robots eventually revolt.
It’s a startlingly prescient piece of early science fiction, and worth reading for the historical footnote alone: every time you use the word “robot,” you’re quoting a Czech play.
About the author: Karel Čapek was the leading Czech playwright, novelist, and columnist of the interwar period, best known for R.U.R. and his novel War with the Newts.
Non-Fiction Books About Czechia
1. Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague by Heda Margolius Kovaly
Heda Margolius Kovály was born to Jewish parents in Prague and survived Auschwitz, where her parents were killed, before escaping a death march back to the city in the final months of the war.
Her husband made it through the same camps, went on to a senior government post as deputy minister of foreign trade, and was then swept up and put to death in the show trials Stalin’s regime staged against the Communist Party’s own ranks in 1952.
It’s a clear-eyed, unsentimental memoir of surviving both the Nazi and Stalinist regimes back to back, and one of the most highly regarded first-hand accounts of either.
2. Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War by Madeleine Albright
Translated by Helen Epstein and Franci Epstein
Before she turned twelve, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s life was shaken by the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, the country where she was born, followed by the Battle of Britain, the near-total destruction of European Jewry, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War.
Albright only learned of her family’s Jewish heritage and the relatives she lost in the Holocaust decades later, at the age of fifty-nine.
3. The Twelve Little Cakes by Dominika Dery
Dominika Dery’s parents were dissidents who backed the failed 1968 reform movement, and paid for it afterwards with lost careers and a forced move to a village outside Prague.
This memoir tells her childhood story from that vantage point: shunned by neighbours, disowned by her Party-elite grandparents, but raised with fierce love and an appetite, quite literally, for life’s small sweetnesses.
4. Gottland: Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia by Mariusz Szczygieł
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
A fascinating outsider’s view: Mariusz Szczygieł is a Polish journalist and writer, not Czech, whose best-selling Gottland was described by the commentator Adam Michnik as the first “cubistic” reportage of the world, and which went on to win the European Book Prize.
Szczygieł spent years chasing down the people behind each story: the shoe magnate who built entire modernist company towns designed by Le Corbusier, the singer Karel Gott, and Kafka’s own niece, who lent her name to blacklisted writers so they could keep publishing under communism.
One standout chapter tracks down the people involved with building, and later demolishing, Prague’s long-vanished monument to Stalin, and finds them still too afraid, decades on, to talk about it openly.
It’s a strange and brilliant way into twentieth-century Czech identity, made all the sharper for being written by someone watching from just across the border.
5. All the Beauty in the World by Jaroslav Seifert
Jaroslav Seifert, a Czechoslovak poet whose work was banned for ten years after he denounced the 1968 Soviet invasion, won the 1984 Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Czechoslovak writer to do so.
All the Beauty in the World, sometimes translated as All the Beauties of the World, gathers his memoirs and selected poems, moving from an intensely lyrical youth through decades of censorship, the Prague Spring, and the underground publishing that kept his work alive.
George Gibian (Editor, Translator), Ewald Osers (Translator)
The Nobel committee singled out the vitality and sensory richness of his verse, and the sense of resilience it managed to convey even under decades of censorship.
About the author: Jaroslav Seifert was born in Žižkov, Prague, in 1901 and died in Prague in 1986, having spent his entire life in the city he wrote about with such devotion.
More Books About Czechia
Looking over this list, what strikes me most is how rarely a Czech writer manages to tell a straight story. Even the memoirs bend towards the absurd, and even the space operas circle back to communism.
Perhaps that’s the real inheritance of a country that has been Bohemia, then Czechoslovakia, then split in two, then Czechia, all within living memory: when the ground keeps shifting under you, you learn to laugh at the shifting, and to write it down before it changes shape again.
Don’t see your favourite Czech book on this list? Let me know in the comments.
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Fantastic Books & Where to Find Them
For more of what to read where, check out my full Travel Books Guide, filled with book recommendations for different destinations, the most beautiful bookstores around the world, tips on how to get the best deals on audiobooks and e-books, as well as more literary travel.
READ AROUND THE WORLD
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Travel Essentials
Here are the websites and services I personally use and recommend.
FLIGHTS: The best deals can be found on Skyscanner, Google Flights and Kiwi (learn more about Kiwi travel hacking here).
TRAVEL INSURANCE: I recommend World Nomads for travel insurance because you can purchase once you’re already overseas and you can easily extend your policy. For digital nomads, I recommend and personally use Genki (learn more about Genki digital nomad health insurance here).
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ACCOMMODATION: I use Booking.com for hotels and Airbnb for apartments. For Colivings, I usually book privately, but Coliving.com is a good place to start.
THINGS TO DO: I use Viator or Get Your Guide for booking day trips, city tours and other activities, though I often check reviews on TripAdvisor too.
Amy Poulton
I’m Amy, an explorer of real and fictional worlds. A word huntress. An escape artist. A page traveller.
I started this blog in 2015 when I was living as an expat in Hong Kong, as a way to keep in touch with friends and family back home. Later, I wrote about my backpacking adventures in Southeast Asia and Mexico, as well as my other experiences living overseas in Italy and Thailand.
Two years ago, I started my next chapter as a digital nomad and travelling cat mom. And of course, I’ve been journeying through books all that time, too.
Now I host Nomad Book Club and literary reading retreats, and offer trip planning services.
Learn more about me and the Page Traveller blog here.