"Extraordinary -- and totally engrossing. Lásko is at once an intimate tale of personal awakening, a love story, and a provocative parable about the lures and dangers of influence." JOHANNA SKIBSRUD, author of Island

When Mája was seven, her mother disappeared. Now Mája has an urge to do the same. She leaves her fiancé in Canada and follows signs that she believes are leading her to the Czech Republic, her mother's home country.

In Prague, she falls in love with Kuba, a charismatic musician who is a rising star in Czech New Age circles. As she navigates this irresistible and overwhelming relationship, Mája is guided by dreams, visions, and synchronicities, but she also suffers from a mysterious illness and the unshakeable sense that something is terribly wrong.

Revealing both the falseness and truth of the stories we tell ourselves, Catherine Cooper's novel is sharply observed, darkly funny, and ultimately moving -- a profound meditation on the pain and potency of love.

Catherine Cooper is a Nova Scotian writer with a Masters degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from Concordia University. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published most recently in Brick Magazine and Guernica Magazine. Her first book, The Western Home: Stories for Home on the Range, is a collection of short stories was published by Pedlar Press in 2014. White Elephant is her first novel. She lives in Prague, Czech Republic.

Catherine Cooper's profile page

Praise for Lásko

"Extraordinary -- and totally engrossing. Lásko is at once an intimate tale of personal awakening, a love story, and a provocative parable about the lures and dangers of influence." JOHANNA SKIBSRUD, author of Island

"Lásko begins as an erudite, spiritual bodice-ripper and then sucks you into a transformational walk through the fire of angry, witty, trippy, jealous, inescapable love: a 2020s clap back at The Unbearable Lightness of Being." SEAN DIXON, author of A God in Need of Help and The Abduction of Seven Forgers

"Compelling, funny, insightful. Lásko is populated with a fascinating cast of characters who are, by turn, deeply compassionate, frustrating, predatory, and above all vibrating with life. A unique and delicately constructed love story." SARAH FABER, author of All Is Beauty Now