This story with clearly autobiographical motifs starts in the late 1990s, when members of the large Máca family gather at a mother's funeral and start to recall and retell their fates, which have been twisted and stigmatised by living under a totalitarian regime. In this family, the author has managed to create a remarkable social sample of Czech society, including an emigrant, a former employee of the communist state police, a chemist, a graduate of a Moscow university and a window cleaner. The narrator of the story is the disabled and totally immobile Pepícek, who has been unable to talk or move without a wheelchair since he was an infant. The inability to move and talk has made him exempt from much of what goes on in "normal" society, though he is much better at observing and commenting on the life around him than anyone else. (Petrov website)
