The Museum of Broken Promises

Name: The Museum of Broken Promises
Rating: 4.1 (1700 reviews)

by Elizabeth Buchan

First published 2019

Amazon

4.1(1,700)

In present-day Paris, Laure runs the Museum of Broken Promises, filling it with objects connected to moments of betrayal, grief and abandoned hope. Among them are traces of her own youth, which she has never fully explained. The narrative returns to Prague in 1985, where the recently bereaved Laure begins a new life behind the Iron Curtain and falls in love with a young dissident musician.

Their relationship draws Laure into a political world of censorship, surveillance and dangerous compromise. Buchan uses the dual timeline to show how private memory can remain trapped inside public history long after a regime has disappeared. The Prague strand is rooted in the late Cold War atmosphere of communist Czechoslovakia and its dissident culture, while the modern museum becomes Laure’s attempt to interpret what happened.