The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

It calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius."
INDEPENDENT

One freezing day in 1948, Klement Gottwald addresses Prague, wearing his comrade Clementis's fur cap - and Communist Czechoslovakia is born. But after being hanged for treason, Clementis is airbrushed out of propaganda photographs; all that remains is his cap.

So begins an unforgettable voyage through seven narratives, from a dissident seeking his first lover to an interrupted ménage-à-trois, a memory-filled island of children, a momentous border-crossing, and beyond. The result is a symphonic masterpiece from one of our century's most dazzling authors.

"The great novel of the end of European Communism: a novel of ideas and eroticism, the surreal and the naturalistic... Intimate and ironic?'
HOWARD JACOBSON