Closely Watched Trains

'There goes our hope. Our youth. To fight for a Free Europe. And what do you get up to here? You print stamps on a telegraphist's behind!'

For twenty-two-year-old Milos, bumbling apprentice at a sleepy Czech railway station, life is full of worries: his burdensome virginity, his love for the pretty conductor Masha, the scandalous goings-on in the station master's office. Beside them, the part he will come to play against the occupying Germans seems a simple affair, in Bohumil Hrabal's touching, absurd masterpiece of humour, humanity and heroism.