The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

‘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

One freezing day in 1948, Klement Gottwald addresses Prague, wearing his comrade Clementis’ fur cap – and Communist Czechoslovakia is born. But after being hanged for treason, Clementis is airbrushed out of propaganda photographs. All that remains is a bare wall, and his cap. So begins an unforgettable voyage through seven narratives, interspersed with luminous meditations on politics, philosophy, music and history.

A dissident seeks his first lover – now a Party loyalist – to persuade her to return his romantic letters. A married couple manages their menage-a-trois as Mother moves in. A clandestine horoscope writer is questioned. An emigre widow struggles to reconstruct memories of her late husband, before finding herself on an island of children. A butcher’s wife embarks on an affair with a poetic student. And one man prepares to cross the border . . .