“The Glass Room” and the Villa Tugendhat
I’ve now finished reading the novel “The Glass Room” by Simon Mawer which is largely set in Czechoslovakia before and during the Second World War. The book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year and it is an excellent work which I’ve reviewed here.
The building featured in the book is real, even though the novel is a work of fiction. It is the Villa Tugendhat which is located in Brno in what is now the Czech Republic.
Before reading the novel, I’d never heard of the building, but I now know that in 1992 the political leaders of Czechoslovakia met there to sign the document that formally divided the country into the present separate states of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
One of my 21 short stories is set in pre-war Czechoslovakia and you can read “The Edge Of War” here.