The Fifth Boat

Piata loď
Slovaška
Monika-Kompaníkova-150x150
Monika Kompaníková 
Children are small and live too close to the earth, much good remains in them from the earth. For children everything is big, everything is important. They’ve not heard about the universe yet, they can’t compare anything to its endlessness. They have clean souls, soft and fragile like silk paper.

A tale of twelve-year-old Jarka who lives with her very young mother in the suburbs, a woman with little interest in being a mother and only a teenager herself when her daughter was born. Given neither love nor attention, Jarka must look after herself and spends many long hours alone in her flat or wandering aimlessly around the estate where she lives. Everything changes when Jarka steals a pram with six-month-old twins in it and then hides with them in a little summer house. Together with Kristián, an eight-year-old boy who has run away from home, the babies form a dream family which Jarka is determined to look after. Piata loď – The Fifth Boat is a dramatic story about unhappy, prematurely adolescent children who avoid the people closest to them so that they can create their own secret world. The novel won the prestigious Anasoft litera prize and became book of the year. It has been adapted to the theater performance. A film version of the book was out in the spring of 2016.

Monika Kompaníková (1979)

Having studied painting, her first literary work was the short story collection A Place for Loneliness (2002). She followed this with the novella White Place (2007) and her hugely successful novel The Fifth Boat (2010), which won her the prestigious Anasoft Litera Prize, has been made into a full-length film of the same name. She is also the author of the children’s book Tales from the Deep Sea (2013), which won awards for both its text and its illustrations. Characteristic features of Kompaníková’s texts are their strong visuality and special atmosphere reflecting her fine arts education – as well as the character of a child confronting the damaging and emotionally deprived world of adults. Her latest work is the novel At the Confluence (2016). She regularly publishes her work in daily newspapers.