Book

Brides of the Gods

The disappearance happens quietly, over the space of an ordinary afternoon: Isa comes home to her Prague apartment and her friend Tabby is gone, leaving a cracked window, a phone on the shoe rack and a trail of coincidences that began with 11:11 showing up everywhere. The police look for a conventional explanation. Isa has already seen too much to accept one. Iva Kenaz's novel takes one of the oldest story shapes in mythology, mortal women wed to the gods, and sets it in a present-day city of trams, restaurants and phone calls that will not connect. Searching for Tabby, Isa is drawn step by step behind the veil: a seeress who seems to have been expecting her, beings with old reasons of their own, and gods of sharply different temperaments, some protective, some predatory, most of them best approached with caution. The chapters track the search and the abductions side by side, building toward the question the title points at: what actually becomes of the women who go, and what the gods want with them. Kenaz, a Czech writer of esoteric fiction, keeps the register grounded. The supernatural arrives through synchronicities, dreams and conversations rather than battles, the danger stays psychological, and the book keeps its own counsel about which of its gods can be trusted. Readers who like their mythic fantasy contemporary, atmospheric and a little unnerving will find a striking world here, drawn with a Czech specificity the genre rarely bothers with. A first edition from 2023, it reads quickly and leaves one door, the red one of its late chapters, deliberately ajar.

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