'A masterpiece' (Salman Rushdie) by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'It took the temperature of the age as no other book did. It was the great novel of the end of European Communism: a novel of ideas and eroticism, the surreal and the naturalistic.' Howard Jacobson'One is torn between profound pleasure in the novel's execution and wonder at the pain that inspired it.' Ian McEwan

The debut by author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being, of which Salman Rushdie said: 'It is impossible to do justice here to the subtleties, comedy and wisdom of this very beautiful novel.'' A funny, sad, gripping, wise, marvellous book.' Sunday TimesLudvik returns to his hometown a bitter man with a single aim: to do unto others what has been done to him. Expelled from the Communist Par...

"I will say no more about this lacerating book except to urge it upon all who care about literature in our difficult era." — Boston Globe"A sly and merciless lampoon of revolutionary romanticism. . . Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in A Handful of Dust."— TimeMilan Kundera initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, accordin...

Befriend a budding poet and his adoring mother in this seductive early novel - winner of the Prix Médicis - by the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'An artist, clearly one of the greatest to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie'Kundera's achievement has been to bring both private life and political life into one comic framework.' Ian McEwanYoung Jaromil knows he i...

A dazzling tragicomic tale from the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'Anyone reading Kundera's books is unlikely to forget them. They have an essential energy, a difference.' New Statesman'Kundera is a self-confessed hedonist in a world beset by politics . . . Marvellous.' Salman RushdieKlima, a celebrated jazz trumpeter, learns that a young nurse with whom he spent one br...

"I will say no more about this lacerating book except to urge it upon all who care about literature in our difficult era." — Boston Globe"A sly and merciless lampoon of revolutionary romanticism. . . Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in A Handful of Dust."— TimeMilan Kundera initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, accordin...

All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.Th...

Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.

In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance. Perhaps the most brilliantly plotted and entertaining of Milan Kundera's novels, Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy.Written in Bohemia in 1969-70, this book was first published in 1976. This beautiful new translation, made...

A budding poet and his adoring mother are the central characters of this intriguing early novel by Milan Kundera. He takes us through the young man's fantasies and love affairs in a characteristic tour de force, alive with wit, eroticism and ideas.

'[A] curious and fascinating book . . . The vivacity of Kundera's prose, the whirl of his ideas, and his sincere engagement with grand narratives and troubling questions remind you what a rare talent he is.' IndependentCasting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism - that's The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who...

Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road - only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone hom...