THE TWELVE LITTLE CAKES: A Memoir

Born in 1975 in Prague, the daughter of former dissidents of the failed Prague Spring in (then) Czechoslovakia, Dery has penned a memoir collecting tales from her early childhood. She lived in a village outside Prague riddled with Communist informers ever-ready to implicate her father, a sometime taxi driver, and her mother, who ghost-wrote books for the Czech Politburo, in anti-Socialist acts. Dery's maternal grandmother was a powerful member of the Communist elite, her grandfather a famed surgeon; both were very wealthy by Czech standards. After the reform movement was quashed by the Soviets, Dery's mother was banished from the family. Written in an old-fashioned style mimicking the fairy tales Dery loved as a child, this account presents every event—the house flooding while under construction, Dery's rejection by her grandparents when she invites them to her Czech ballet debut, the unpleasant death of the family's St. Bernard—in a vacuum. Dery never veers from the perspective of a very young child, thus providing no context by which to judge the story of growing up in the last years of the Communist state. Still, it's a sometimes charming period piece. Agent, Theresa Park. (Oct. 4)

Forecast: With a blurb from Nicholas Sparks, the book may appeal to women readers. Foreign rights have been sold in France, Germany, Italy and Spain.