In 1968, the Soviet-Warsaw Pact Army invaded Czechoslovakia, bringing an end to the Prague Spring, and her family managed to leave for the United Kingdom just weeks before the borders closed shut.
[3] Her family later moved to the United States, where Bren attended Garden City High School in New York, and then Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
[5] Her first book,The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Cornell University Press, 2010), is a history of everyday life in the two decades after the Soviet invasion.
It was published in 2021 by Simon & Schuster in the U.S.[10] and by Two Roads/Hachette in the U.K.[11] It has been translated into Spanish, Italian,[12] and Russian, with foreign rights also sold to South Korea, China, and Hungary.
Bren weaves the history of the hotel from its opening in the 1920s to its conversion to luxury condominiums in the 2000s to tell the story of its residents, of New York City, and of female ambition in 20th century America.