Jouney to the South

In a small village on the southern coast of Crete, the narrator meets a young man who tells him a history of his journey which took him from Prague as far as the Libyan sea. It is a voyage to uncover mysterious deaths of two brothers: one was murdered during the ballet performance, the body of the second was found by Turkish fishermen at the Asia Minor shores.

On the move, the amateur detective is accompanied by one of the brother's girlfriend. They have to work out a lot of traces, clues and rebuses, including seemingly meaningless clusters of letters in the picture of a Hungarian painter, fragments of words created in the sea by bodies of phosphorescing worms, puzzling shapes of jelly sweets found in a small shop in Croatia, or the plot of an American sci-fi thriller movie, which the protagonists watch in a cinema in the suburb of Rome.

Such leads send the heroes from town to town; the plot unfolds on night trains and in many places across Europe - in Bratislava, Budapest, Ljubljana, on the islands of Mykonos and Crete. With the search for the murderer of both brothers, many other stories are interconnected, taking the readers to even more distant places of the Earth: Moscow, Boston, Mexico City.

Journey to the South by Michal Ajvaz is an intriguing exploration of mystery and adventure that will captivate readers through its elaborate and adventurous narrative.