In the Garden of Men

The winner of the thirtieth annual International 3-Day Novel Contest. In 1968, an inconsequential civil servant finds himself swept into the mechanism of state oppression when the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia. Put to work processing the arrest warrants of anyone who opposes the repressive regime, he falls quickly into the moral no-man’s-land of repressive bureaucracy.
As his humanity succumbs to the requirements of state doctrine, a series of chance encounters leads him to realize that in the world of men, there are no saints, no ideologies, no proclamations for a perfect salvation, only the fundamental choice: to act or not. A remarkable literary debut.
John Kupferschmidt’s inspiration for this novel came from his parents, who arrived in North America as political refugees from the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.