Purity’s stories take the reader through cities and suburbs, apartments and streets, to find characters struggling to survive in modern society: a man has a breakdown on a bus; a fugitive gains insight from a colour wheel; a social realist kills his friend with a hammer; a thief proclaims his innocence. And cleaners reluctantly clean up.

Praise for Wretchedness

‘An utterly phenomenal read: a masterclass in hyper-modernist experimentation, voice and form. Embracing the bitter realities of addiction, prejudice and inner-city turmoil, Tichý’s rapid prose roves internal dialogues, places, vernaculars and circumstances to expose a singular, absorbed world struggling to keep itself afloat.’ Anthony Anaxagorou

‘A deeply musical book . . . and it is testament to Nichola Smalley’s skill that this musicality survives translation . . . Wretchedness is sensitive and compelling.’ Jon Day, Financial Times

‘The tension between polyphony and cacophony is exhilarating . . . this furious novel’s brevity is deceptive; getting through it requires stamina, but our brief stay in the cellist’s mind is powerfully, nightmarishly unforgettable.’ Peter Brown, The TLS

‘What matters in this novel is how it all sounds, the clashes and stresses in the language and the energy of the surface, how it strives, ascends, descends, and trembles, like a tug-of war between weight and levity (to paraphrase a description from the book of Scelsi’s Fourth String Quartet).’ Caleb Klaces, The White Review

‘Visceral . . . a fascinating read, the real-life details of which further bolster the fiction . . . This is nightmarish, impressionistic literature whose disjointed sentences have an associative flow that accumulates to a shocking whole.’ Sarah Gilmartin, Irish Times ‘There is a kind of unholy music in this powerful, punchy, perceptive novel.’ Eithne Farry, Daily Mail

‘The polyphony of voices is tightly interwoven . . . arranged into a narrative resembling a complex musical composition . . . The book ends abruptly, as an avant-garde piece of music might, but the vibrations continue to fill the air.’ Anna Aslanyan, The Guardian

‘A blurry tornado of voices and timelines, this short novel unspools over eight paragraphs of run-on sentences swirling around the memories of a cellist raised on an estate outside Malmö . . . the novel builds to an unexpectedly heart-stopping . . . finale, with a frame-breaking time-slip that invites us to reconsider everything we’ve just read as a stylistically radical expression of survivor’s guilt.’ Anthony Cummins, Book of the Day The Observer

‘Graphic depictions of crime, racism, poverty, drug use and violence are rendered through paragraph-free slabs of text that propulsively veer between voices and minds, times and locations. As well as the Swedish estates, the novel draws on Tichý’s experiences of living in Hamburg and London to paint a picture of a pan-European community of the excluded passing through squats, underground clubs, petty scams and cash-only employment. Tichý’s early creative life centered on music and there is a sense of musicality inherent Wretchedness.' Nicholas Wroe, Guardian