The Agnes Cycle
Four interconnected novels · Literary historical fiction
A European novel cycle from the mystical heart of Bohemia, connected by the figure of Agnes of Bohemia.
A four-part literary cycle woven around the life of Agnes of Bohemia and the Czech royal family of the 13th century, moving between Prague, Central Europe and Italy.
Drawing on real historical events, the novels look beyond kings, saints and official narratives to the lives beneath them — women and children, bodies and desires, faith and doubt, power and powerlessness.
At the centre is Agnes: a royal daughter who became one of Bohemia’s most revered saints. The cycle follows her from childhood into adulthood, searching behind the legend for a woman trying to remain truthful to her own experience.
Four novels: One life unfolding behind the legend
3: Manuscript
Published 2021
Completed manuscript
In development
2: Heresy
Hereze
Literary historical fiction · 246 pp
Completed manuscript
Planned publication · Spring 2027
The woman behind the saint
In 1234, Agnes of Bohemia enters the convent she has founded and is celebrated as a woman who has freely sacrificed everything for God. But Agnes is hiding a secret: before entering the convent, she gave birth to a child.
Years later, the past begins to return through her body — insomnia, somnambulism, fragments of memory. As Agnes becomes abbess, her private struggle collides with a larger conflict over poverty, freedom and obedience within the Franciscan movement and the Church.
HERESY is a novel about the space between the woman and the saint — and about everything that has to disappear for a human being to become a legend.
For readers of Lauren Groff’s Matrix and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls.
1: The Secret
Tajemství
Published 2021 by Jota Publishing House
Magnesia Litera 2022 Debut of the Year
Agnes grows up between a Polish monastery, the Austrian court and Prague — a royal daughter expected to follow a path chosen for her by others.
Drawn instead to nature, imagination and an inner world of her own, she begins to search for a different kind of freedom.
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All illustrations by © Petr Nikl
When stories are to remain alive,they must be told again and again.
TD.2@email.cz