Everyone who read it asked me the same question. I never answered.
Novel Touch – The Story of Ethan & Francesca by Hynek Vrba
My Novel Touch — The Story of Ethan & Francesca was published in January 2019. It is the story of two people who cannot be together — not because of war or distance, but because of her situation. The particular, quiet, real kind of impossibility that lives in ordinary life. A modern Romeo and Juliet, if you need a comparison — but without the balcony, without the poetry, without any distance that lets you think this is just a story.
The novel is told in his voice. Ethan is an artist, but business-focused. A realist by training, not a dreamer — a man who learned early to be emotionally controlled, to keep things measured, practical, in hand. Then he meets Francesca. And from that control, he begins to change. His messages to her become poetic. The book holds his thinking process — his understanding, his misunderstanding, his inner fights, his sacrifices — but also the exact words she wrote to him, said to him, and the words he wrote back. You watch a controlled man become a pure romantic, in real time, through his own handwriting. That transformation is the heartbeat of the book.
I rewrote it fourteen times before I finally decided to publish. Not because I was unsure of the story — I was unwilling to let it leave me until it was true. Every rewrite was a layer I had to live through, again and again, before I could publish it. The book could only be published when I had nothing left to hide behind.
I wrote it because I believed it could help. All my art — painting, photography, film — has been made with one intention: to connect with people and help them. Not to decorate, not to impress, but to reach someone who needs it. I hoped someone in a similar situation would read it, watch it, see the paintings, and recognize Francesca — and then maybe think again. Fight for the change instead of fearing it. The story was never about me. It was about her, and about them.
But the story did not begin with the book. It began with the paintings.
featuring layered, semi-transparent black glass.
Twelve large-scale paintings, so realistic that people thought they were photographs. Each one was sold. And each one held pieces of the story — hidden in details, some so quiet that buyers lived with the painting for years without noticing what was actually there. The paintings came first. Then came a short artistic film (called LATE), premiered on the 10th of January 2016 in Valletta, Malta — a heavy, dramatic film built to create curiosity, to pull you in so deeply that you needed to know more, needed to find the story. Three years later, the book followed.
Three elements. One project. One heartbreaking real story — told as a puzzle. If you see the paintings, if you watch the film, if you read the book, you understand it all. No single piece is complete alone. That was the point.
It wasn’t an experiment. It was my intention — my craft — to connect the right people with a story I felt needed to be told, and a message that needed to be sent. I have been an artist since I was six. I have always worked with the emotions of people, their struggles, the stories that are real.
Which is why I am bringing this story to Korea and Japan.
I believe the depth of this story — the love that cannot speak, the quiet suffering, the sacrifice no one sees, a man learning to be romantic against his own nature, a woman named Francesca who may feel closer to readers here than anywhere — is something understood here. Perhaps understood here better than anywhere. The translation I am considering is not a project. It is a conversation I want to have with readers here, women who feel deeply and read closely, who know that real love is not fantasy — it is the most ordinary, most impossible thing in a life.
If the story finds them, I will know I was right. And maybe then I will answer their question.
