For reasons of her own, Hero Tojosoa accepts an invitation she was half expected to decline, and finds herself in Prague on a bachelorette weekend hosted by her estranged friend, Sofie Cibulkova. Little does she know she's arrived in a city with a penchant for playing tricks on the unsuspecting. A book Hero has brought with her seems to be warping her mind: the text changes depending on when it's being read and who's doing the reading, revealing startling new sto­ries of fictional Praguers past and present. Un­invited companions appear at bachelorette activities and at city landmarks, offering opin­ions, humor, and even a taste of treachery. When a third woman from Hero and Sofie's past ap­pears unexpectedly, the tensions between the friends' different accounts of the past reach a new level.An adventurous, kaleidoscopic novel, Parasol Against the Axe considers the lines between il­lusion and delusion, fact and interpretation, and weighs the risks of attaching too firmly to the stories of a place, or a person, or a shared his­tory. How much is a tale influenced by its reader, or vice versa? And finally, in a battle between friends, is it better to be the parasol or the axe?