Before I dive into this novel, set in what was then Czechoslovakia as the nation contorts itself into the Prague Spring, I want to talk about its publisher, Homeward Books. There isn't much online to tell me about them, but they're a new small press and this is its initial release. They already have a second lined up for June. What attracts me to them, beyond the fact that they sent me a copy of this for review, is their mission statement: "We publish books that defy the constraints of genre, because we believe that weird, brave, complex stories deserve a home."

Hallelujah to that, say I. The people behind Homeward Books are industry people, but they clearly see the flaws in the industry. It's bigger and broader than ever, but it doesn't take the chances it used to and it sparked reluctantly but surely into existence when M. Huw Evans, who's edited for a variety of publishers, "suspected that most of the books he loved would be rejected by publishers today." I'm sure he's not wrong, especially if read the unspoken "major" there. There are original books out there and they're being published, but the doors of the majors do seem to be closed to anything not already selling like hot cakes. It's the small presses and the self-published authors in most instances who roll the dice.

So, as a long standing fan of genrehopping anything, not merely books, I'm eager to see what this small press brings us over the next few years. Sadly, I can't ask them for a paying job, because the few people at Homeward Books have other ones to pay their bills, with any profits that they make funnelled right back into their next title, but I will absolutely be paying attention to what they do next. They're kicking off with a good one.

We're in Prague in 1967, which was under Communist rule then, a few years before I was born. I'd been Czechoslovakia in some sort of primary school football tournament and I loved that it had a name that long and awkward, but I didn't know much about it then. It wasn't even Czechoslovakia until after the First World War—it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before that and now calls itself the Czech Republic—and the Nazis occupied it during the Second. The locals were used to being occupied. By 1948, it was by the Soviet Union and the first real crack in their armour was the Prague Spring in 1967. This novel is a fascinating historical glimpse into how that came about.

The setup is brutalism with flowers. I can feel the concrete everywhere but there's also life that's waiting patiently, maybe aching heartily, to burst through the cracks. Everything's broken, which includes the people. Alica Hovanova, who's our guide through this surreal nightmare of a broken fairy tale, even though she would freely admit that she has absolutely no idea what she's doing, is part of a broken family. Her drunk stepfather isn't quite abusive to her but he's getting close and he has been to her mother for a long time. He's ex-Soviet Army and she wants out.

She finds a way through a newspaper ad. An old lady is willing to teach typing and stenography in exchange for housework. She wouldn't even need to pay. So she visits Pani Agáta Riedl, who lives in a shared apartment with a sprawling antique unicorn tapestry on the wall, large enough that it spreads onto a second, and a shining old Remington typewriter. She has no idea how these three new discoveries will change her life, but they do and this is where that begins. Given that this was always going to be about change and we know with historical hindsight that the Prague Spring is just around the corner, I couldn't help but wonder how much Alica represents her nation.

Frankly, I'm still not sure because I don't have enough grounding in the region to see that, but my feeling that she's her nation in microcosm continued throughout the book. Even if she's intended to be just an anonymous cog in the machines of history, as indeed is Pani Agáta, they still work as symbols. While we always follow the former, as she gains a job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, attends a crucial meeting at a palatial hunting lodge and moves up to the Defense Ministry, the latter is such a magnetic supporting character that it's hard not to want to stay with her.

We never quite learn what Agáta did, because it surely wasn't just what was listed in her records. She's old and never leaves her apartment, but she has ears everywhere, connections in almost as many places and favours given to be called in as and when she needs. She feels like a spymaster, a puppetmaster sitting calmly in an inconsequential room quietly pulling strings all over the city. It lends even her most banal requests a serious weight and perhaps that's why Alica always listens to her, even when she dosen't think she's saying anything and certainly when she doesn't want to. And, of course, none of that changes when we realise with Alica that she isn't really teaching her typing, she's teaching her to wield power.

If this sounds like general fiction in a historical setting, then it is, but the reason it shifts at least a half step into genre is because the third most important character is the tapestry, 'The Hunt of a Unicorn', which can't be alive in general fiction but can do wonderful things in magical realism. In particular, it tells its story in seven panels and it has done for half a millennium, but when it feels the need, it changes the order of those panels. This isn't fantasy, but it's a fantastic element and it only becomes more so as the book runs on and the stakes increase.

There are other characters, of course, and many of them play important supporting roles, but it's fair to say that none of them, however well they're drawn—not co-worker Mila, boss Blaha Jr. or boyfriend of sorts Vasek—have the impact that Agáta and the tapestry have. A chess game as big as the Prague Spring features more than sixteen pawns. Of course, Agáta is the Witch of Prague, a sobriquet given to her from the F. Marion Crawford novel, which is absolutely genre, but she isn't really any more. As one generation hands over to another in Prague, she's handing over her title to Alica. There's a neat reference to "the witch no longer and the witch not quite yet".

And that's the sort of succinct linguistic beauty that lurks around every page here. I breathed in a city through its pages but it's the tiny moments that stood out to me the most. The entire chapter at the hunting lodge is disturbing, a serious escalation within the story, but it's a moment during its aftermath that grabbed my heart. Alica's been groped, by the sort of man who treats power as a green light to do what he likes, but she learns that she was lucky. "There are worse verbs than to grope," she says and that's oceans deep. A suggested definition of magic as someone's metaphor taken literally by someone else is deeper still.

Those moments don't have to be linguistic either. There are a hundred reasons how we know that Alica is poor but the true meaning of that doesn't manifest until a particular scene. So she's living with her mother and wicked stepfather and can only dream of an apartment of her own? That's an accepted norm for most of the current generation of Americans. Her sheer joy at the sight of the Remington in Agáta's apartment is telling, but the point, a hundred pages in, when she rides in a car for the very first time in her life, is a klaxon to the brain. That's privilege in Prague? Wow.

There's also power in the aftermath of a scene in which students try to persuade authorities to fix the lights in their dorms. It's a peaceful protest, a march by candlelight, though that's still quite a venture in a nation under the communist jackboot. However, the next day, there are no traces of it whatsoever. It feels like a pivotal moment in history, like the protests against ICE in Minnesota, but told (or not) only through word of mouth because the controlled media doesn't want to know, a few dismissals aside. As bad as it is right now, I couldn't help but think, "There are worse verbs than to grope".

But hey, those who read history are doomed to watch others repeat it, right? This is dramatic and tense and philosophical, not to ignore magical, but it's also true, even if it's fiction. And it reminds us that even an important step in the right direction, like the Prague Spring, is often followed by a closed door, like the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact in 1968, but it's also points the way towards a breakthrough, even if the Velvet Revolution took another three decades to arrive, probably because young ladies like Alica met old witches like Agáta. I'd read that sequel too. ~~ Hal C F Astell