By the writer Milan Kundera called Czechoslovakia's greatest
contemporary writer comes a novel (now in English for the first time)
peopled with eccentric, unforgettable inhabitants of a home for the
elderly who reminisce about their lives and their changing country.
Written with a keen eye for the absurd and sprinkled with dialogue that
captures the poignancy of the everyday, this novel allows us into the
mind of an elderly woman coming to terms with the passing of time.
Praise for Too Loud a Solitude
Short, sharp and eccentric. Sophisticated, thought-provoking and pithy.
--Spectator
Unmissable, combines extremes of comedy and seriousness, plus pathos,
slapstick, sex and violence all stirred into one delicious brew. --The
Guardian
In imaginative riches and sheer exhilaration it offers more than most
books twice its size. At once tender and scatological, playful and
sombre, moving and irresistibly funny. --The Independent on Sunday
Praise for I Served the King of England
A joyful, picaresque story, which begins with Baron Munchausen-like
adventures and ends in tears and solitude. -- James Wood, The London
Review of Books
A comic novel of great inventiveness ... charming, wise, and sad--and an
unexpectedly good laugh. --The Philadelphia Inquirer
An extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel. --The New York Times
Dancing Lessons unfurls as a single, sometimes maddening sentence. The
gambit works. Something about that slab of wordage carries the eye
forward, promising an intensity simply unattainable by your regularly
punctuated novel. --Ed Park, The New York Times Book Review
