(And all happened not in unknown mysterious place with a coast but in Prague. If you are interested in dissident movement in Czechoslovakia during the Communists and want to see it from the personal prospective)
Linda Wren is a Czech exile living in London, unhappy with her present and trying to forget her past. But escaping to a remote cottage in North Wales merely forces her to come to terms with her early life Prague -- from childhood memories of the Russian soldiers in World Wae II through an adolescent infatuation with Stalin to the tragic events of 1968. Sometimes painful, often sparkily humorous, Stalin's Shoe is a wonderfully fresh and orginal novel that invents its own powerful genre of magical feminism.