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 Detective to a house at the foot of  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 England—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. She has written nine books. Denemarková is the only Czech writer who has received the Magnesia Litera Award four times, and has received international awards such as the Styria Literature Prize, the Brücke Berlin Award, the Franz Kafka Prize from the ÖGfL, and the European Prize for Tolerance, among others. Her works have been translated into twenty-three languages. A Contribution to the History of Joy won the Spycher Leuk Literature Award 2019, and is her second book to be published in English. She lives in Prague.

TRANSLATOR BIO:

Julia and Peter Sherwood are literary translators based in London. Julia Sherwood took up literary translation after working in the NGO sector for over twenty years; she is also the editor of Seagull Books’ Slovak List. Peter Sherwood taught Hungarian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London and in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Together, they have translated into English some thirty books by mostly contemporary Slovak and Czech writers.

“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