Arrested in 1981, the author was herself held there for eleven months in for sedition after signing Charter 77, which criticised the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for human rights failings related to the Helsinki Accords.

[3] Aspects of the characters' prison life include diseases, interrogations, the exercise yard under close guard, improvised cosmetics and Christmas decorations, a gypsy wedding and, in the last chapter of the book, séances.

[3] Much of the book concerns the women's communications with each other and with the male prisoners housed below them, by passing notes on string or through bars, tapping on heating pipes and the floor in Morse code, yelling into the toilet system, and through song.

An English translation was published in 1987 by The Overlook Press with an introduction by Václav Havel, who himself spent several stretches of time in Ruzyně.

[1] A Los Angeles Times review of the book wrote that "the clarity, the imagination, the wit, the odd detail, the light-filled corners of Kantůrková's darkest observations are in the best Czech literary tradition" and that it "may indeed be the best novel of its genre since Solzhenitsyn's far bleaker One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.