Good Night, Sweet Dreams

The novel Good Night, Sweet Dreams is set in Brno on a single day (30 April 1945) at the end of the war. It is the story of the hunt for penicillin for Dr Lagužin’s sanatorium in the quarter of Zábrdovice. Although the centre of the city has been liberated, fighting continues in the northern quarters of Královo Pole and Řečkovice. Much of the Wehrmacht force and many SS units are on the run; prisoners are returning from concentration camps to find their houses occupied and with no supply of electricity and gas. The waterworks in the quarter of Pisárky has been destroyed, the dead are being buried in gardens and parks; chaos rules. This is the ‘zero hour’. No one can be certain what tomorrow will bring. This story is told not as non-fiction but as ‘novel as myth’ – part grotesque, part tragedy, where the imagination is as important as factual accounts.