A Contribution to the History of Joy

The body of a wealthy, middle-aged businessman is discovered hanging in the attic of his Old Town Prague villa. At first, everything points to suicide, but his young Widow denies the possibility. The ensuing investigation leads a noir-like Detective to a house on Petřín Hill, where three elderly women live: a yoga instructor, a film director, and a creative writing teacher. As the Detective pores through their vast archive of documents, most of which concern rape and abuse cases dating back to World War II, he begins to suspect the women of taking justice into their own hands. How far are they willing to go in their efforts to right the “raped century”? 

Denemarková’s fourth novel addresses the sexualized violence that pervades all times and cultures—from Nazi crimes in Poland to mass rape in India and forced prostitution of minors in the Czech Republic—a universal calamity stored in the body’s memory, for which the birds are the only reliable witnesses.

Publication date: September 22, 2026

Format: Trade Paperback

Dimensions: 5.5x8.5

Page Count: 344

ISBN: 9781566897662

Radka Denemarková is a celebrated Czech novelist, dramatist, TV screenplay writer, translator, and essayist. Denemarková is the only Czech writer who has received the Magnesia Litera Award four times. Her works have been translated into 23 languages. She lives in Prague. A Contribution to the History of Joy won the Spycher Leuk Literature Award 2019, and is her first book to be published in English.

Julia Sherwood is a translator from Slovak, Czech, Polish, Russian and German into English (with Peter Sherwood), as well as into Slovak. She was born and grew up in Bratislava and studied English and Slavic languages and literatures at universities in Cologne, Munich and London, graduating with a Masters degree in 1983.  After working for over 20 years in the NGO sector, she became a full-time freelance translator in 2010. She is currently living in London.  Julia served as editor-at-large for Slovakia with the online translation journal Asymptote (2013–2023) and is the editor of Seagull Books’ Slovak List.

Praise for Radka Denemarková

“Radka Denemarková is one of the most provocative, political and at the same time one of the most poetic authors of the present, as she proves in her novel A Contribution to the History of Joy…The painfulness of the narrative, the poetry and the precision of the language are by no means mutually exclusive.” —Jury, Spycher Leuk Literature Award 2019

“Radka Denemarková lives up to her reputation as the Czech Republic's "Elfriede Jelinek" with her novel A Contribution to the History of Joy…Playful with language and fond of metaphors like her famous Austrian colleague, just as provocative, yet completely unclouded by ideology, she is the great taboo-breaker and thematic setter of contemporary Czech literature.” —Andreas Breitenstein, NZZ

“What begins as a crime thriller soon turns out to be a socially critical novel: Radka Denemarková’s A Contribution to the History of Joy examines the asymmetrical relationship between the sexes in a virtuoso narrative act.” —Alexandra Millner, Die Presse

“Cruelly unforgiving, but far from heartless, heavily metaphorical, but far from hamfisted, formally perfect, but far from futilely formalistic. Radka Denemarková’s new prose work, A Contribution to the History of Joy, is an admirable work, a small miracle of literature.” —Katerina Kirkosová, h7o.cz