PRAGUE

A debut novel of astonishing scope and ambition, Prague depicts a generation willfully lost, following five American expatriates who arrive in Budapest in the early 1990s seeking fortune—financial, romantic, and spiritual—in an exotic city newly opened to the West. They harbor a vague suspicion that their counterparts in Prague, where the atmosphere of post-Cold War European decadence is even more cinematically perfect, are better off than they are. Even so, they hope to find adventure, inspiration, a gold rush, or history being made before them. But what they actually find is a deceptively beautiful place, one they rarely comprehend.