Ignorance

The bestselling masterpiece tale of love and exile in Prague by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie 'A subtle, penetrating and deeply felt exploration of the sadness, loneliness and irreparable loss of exile: one of [Kundera's] best novels.' Sunday Times Irena has been exiled to Paris since leaving Czechoslovakia after the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. Twenty years later, after the collapse of Communism, she returns to her homeland - and reunites, by chance, with Josef, a fellow émigré and her one-time lover. Will they pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted in their native land almost as soon as it began - now lost in the tides of history, far from home? Or do their memories no longer align? A profound, polyphonic meditation on absence and alienation, nostalgia and truth, Ignorance is a masterpiece exposing the reality behind the romance of the homeward voyage.

The French-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in the Czech Republic and has lived in France since 1975. He died in Paris in 2023.