This breathtaking, reverberating survey of human nature finds Kundera still attempting to work out the meaning of life, without losing his acute sense of humour. It is one of those great unclassifiable masterpieces that appear once every twenty years or so. 'It will make you cleverer, maybe even a better lover. Not many novels can do that.' Nicholas Lezard, GQ
Author
People best know Czech-born writer Milan Kundera for his novels, including The Joke (1967), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), all of which exhibit his extreme though often comical skepticism. Since 1975, he lived in exile in France and in 1981 as a naturalized citizen. Kundera wrote in Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; people therefore consider these original works as not translations. The Communist government of Czechoslovakia censored and duly banned his books from his native country, the case until the downfall of this government in the velvet revolution of 1989.
