"More Than One Life is a chronicle of several generations of an upper-middle-class Czech family, told from the point of view of a woman who reached adulthood in the 1930s."--BOOK JACKET.

"Beginning in the years preceding World War II, this novel concentrates on the narrator's tragically mismatched parents and the children's attempts to come to terms with each of them. The father achieved success in life by conventional criteria; he is the husband of an attractive, intelligent woman; he is a successful manufacturer; he has sired four fine children. But he is a man rooted in the conventions of his time.

As the years pass, he becomes more volatile and isolated and ultimately abandons the family."--BOOK JACKET.

"As the narrator probes her past, she is forced to analyze her own half-buried memories and feelings: feelings of relief over the departure of her father; guilt for not acknowledging her father's grief following her mother's death; the fear and revulsion that she and her siblings felt for their father during their childhood years.

As she tries to reconstruct childhood events by comparing her own recollections with those of her siblings, she comes to view her entire family in a new way, seeing her parents as well as herself with unexpected, startling insights, with new respect, pity, guilt, and forgiveness. Ultimately, she finds that each individual revelation makes the dark burden of the past easier to bear."--BOOK JACKET.