The Attempt

"[Platzová’s] characters are full of compassion and tenderness."Agnieszka Holland, Academy Awardnominated writer and director of Europa Europa and guest director of HBO’sThe Wire and Netflix’s House of Cards

"Platzová’s prose is as sharp and effective as the angles of an expressionist monument."Publishers Weekly

When a Czech historian becomes convinced he’s the illegitimate great-grandson of an infamous anarchist who attempted an assassination while living in the United States, he travels to New York to investigate. Arriving in Manhattan during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, his research takes him further back into the pastfrom the Pittsburgh home of a nineteenth-century US industrialist to 1920s Europe, where a celebrated anarchist couple is on the run from the law.

Based on the lives of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, The Attempt is a novel about the legacy of radical politics and relationshipsone that traverses centuries and continents to deliver a moving, powerful story of personal and political transformation.

Magdaléna Platzová is the author of six books, including two novels published in English:Aaron’s Leap, a Lidové Noviny Book of the Year Award finalist, and The Attempt, a Czech Book Award finalist. Her fiction has also appeared inA Public Space and Words Without Borders. Platzová grew up in the Czech Republic, studied in Washington, DC, and England, received her MA in Philosophy at Charles University in Prague, and has taught at New York University’s Gallatin School. She is now a freelance journalist based in Lyon, France.