I really liked the book. It may by because I am from Prague and I was about the same age as the characters in this book when I was enjoying the first years after the fall of communism, spending them essentially the same way – philosophing in bohemian coffee shops and hanging in rock clubs, which Prague was very famous for. It was time of euphorism and everybody was enjoying life in a free culture, and it hit me at the right age. I think for people to truly understand what was going on and how people were feeling, one must grow up or even experience a little bit of the communistic way of life.

http://praguethenovel.com/

Story in Prague follows five American expats who come to Budapest in the early 1990s to seek their fortune — financial, romantic, and spiritual — in an exotic city newly opened to the West. They harbor the vague suspicion that their counterparts in Prague, where the atmospheric decay of post–Cold War Europe is even more cinematically perfect, have it better. Still, they hope to find adventure, inspiration, a gold rush, or history in the making. What they actually find is a deceptively beautiful place that they often fail to understand. What does it mean to fret about your fledgling career when the man across the table was tortured by two different regimes? How does your short, uneventful life compare to the lives of those who actually resisted, fought, and died? What does your angst mean in a city still pocked with bullet holes from war and crushed rebellion?

Journalist John Price finds these questions impossible to answer yet impossible to avoid, though he tries to forget them in the din of Budapest's nightclubs, in a romance with a secretive young diplomat, at the table of an elderly cocktail pianist, and in the moody company of a young man obsessed with nostalgia. Arriving in Budapest one spring day to pursue his elusive brother, John finds himself pursuing something else entirely, something he can't quite put a name to, something that will draw him into stories much larger than himself.