A maid who is unexpectedly bequeathed her wealthy employers` worldly possessions when they flee the country after the Nazi occupation; a loyal bank clerk, who steals a Renaissance portrait of a Spanish noblewoman, & falls into troublesome love with her; a middle-aged travel agent, who is perhaps the least well-travelled man in the city & advises his clients from what he has read in books, anxiously awaiting his looming honeymoon; a widowed villager, whose `magnetic` twelve-year-old daughter witnesses a disturbing event; & a tiny village thrown into civil war by the disappearance of a freshly baked cheesecake. These stories about the tremendous upheaval which results when the ordinary encounters the unexpected are vividly told, with both humour & humanity. This is the first ever English publication of these both literally & metaphorically Bohemian tales, by one of the great overlooked writers of the twentieth century.