Prague is a city full of incredible stories. You can find everything here: ancient legends, wartime heroes, and complicated love stories.
A great way to understand this magical place is through the novels it has inspired. This list is your guide to Prague’s history, its secrets, and its special kind of dark humor, one book at a time.
Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem pulls you straight into the shadows of Prague’s old Jewish Quarter. You follow Athanasius Pernath, a quiet jeweler. His life suddenly fills with unsettling visions and encounters with figures who seem half real, half ghost.
It all connects to the old legend of the Golem, the clay giant protector. The book mixes the everyday with the deeply strange. You get a real sense of unease and mystery that feels just right for those old Prague streets.
Milan Kundera introduces us to four people whose lives cross in Prague during the turbulent 1960s and 70s, under Soviet occupation. At the center is Tomas, a surgeon caught between Tereza, his wife, and Sabina, his artist lover.
Their relationships unfold against the backdrop of the Prague Spring and its aftermath. The story examines their choices about love, loyalty, and what it means to live when political forces loom large.
Bohumil Hrabal is the master of capturing the voice of the Prague pub—the bittersweet, funny, and profound chatter of ordinary people. In his poetic masterpiece, Too Loud a Solitude, we descend into a damp cellar with Haňťa, a man who has spent 35 years operating a hydraulic press, compacting wastepaper and, tragically, forbidden books.
But Haňťa is on a mission of salvation. He rescues the most beautiful books, reads them obsessively, and fills his home and head with the wisdom of writers the state wants to erase. The novel is a heartbreaking and beautiful ode to the resilience of culture against destruction. It captures the very soul of a city that has always treasured its ideas, even when forced to do so in secret.
Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk is hilarious. You follow the title character through the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. Is Švejk a total fool, or is he cleverly messing with everyone? It is hard to tell! He stumbles from one disaster to another.
His interactions with pompous officers and ridiculous military rules are pure chaos. When he confronts incompetent leaders or questions nonsensical orders, his actions perfectly expose how silly war and bureaucracy can be.
In Ignorance, also by Milan Kundera, two people return to Prague. Irena and Josef have been exiles for years, and now they must confront what “home” means after so long away. The Prague they find is not quite the one they left. Their memories clash with reality.
As they navigate this changed city and meet people from their past, the book looks closely at nostalgia, the tricks memory plays, and the feeling of being disconnected from your own history.
Laini Taylor gives us Karou, an art student in Prague with striking blue hair and secrets she doesn’t even know herself. She spends her days sketching monsters, but her nights involve strange errands for Brimstone, the chimaera who raised her.
Prague, with its gargoyles and bridges, is the perfect setting for this story. Soon, Karou meets a mysterious angel, Akiva, and discovers her life connects to an ancient, hidden war between angels and chimaera.
Laurent Binet’s HHhH reconstructs a real, incredibly dangerous mission from World War II. Two Czechoslovak paratroopers, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, were sent to Prague to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the high-ranking Nazi leader feared as “The Butcher of Prague.”
Binet tells their story but also includes his own process as the writer. He questions how we can accurately capture history and the bravery of these men. The result is a unique look at a pivotal moment in Prague’s wartime history.
Radek John’s Memento offers a stark look at Prague in the 1980s through the eyes of Michal, a teenager sliding into drug addiction. The story does not shy away from the harsh realities.
You see Michal’s world shrink as drugs take over, his relationships with family crumble, and his grasp on life loosens. It is a powerful account of addiction’s destructive path within the specific context of late-socialist Czechoslovakia.
Philip Roth sends his famous character, Nathan Zuckerman, to communist Prague in the 1970s. Zuckerman is on a mission to rescue the lost Yiddish manuscript of a writer silenced by the Nazis.
He finds a city full of artists and intellectuals who live under constant surveillance and repression. Zuckerman navigates secret parties, tense encounters with informants, and the general absurdity of life under an oppressive regime.
The book captures the dark humor and the strange energy of that time.
Josef Škvorecký introduces Lieutenant Boruvka, a Czech detective working a case in Prague just before World War II. A young woman known only as Miss Silver is found dead. Boruvka must untangle the secrets of her life.
His investigation leads him through different layers of Prague society. He uncovers hidden connections and personal dramas against a background of rising political tension as war approaches. You really get a feel for the city’s atmosphere during this uncertain period.
No literary tour of Prague is complete without Franz Kafka. In The Trial, a bank clerk named Josef K. is arrested one morning without being told what crime he has committed. What follows is a nightmarish journey through a baffling and inaccessible legal system, where the rules are unknown and guilt is assumed.
While Kafka rarely names the city in his work, Prague is the book’s spiritual home. The novel’s sense of anxiety and absurdity, of navigating labyrinthine corridors and facing faceless, powerful authorities, perfectly captures the psychological atmosphere that has become synonymous with the city. This feeling is so unique that it gave the world a new word: “Kafkaesque.”