Harlequin's Millions: A Novel [Paperback]

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 forToo 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 Independenton Sunday

Praise forI Served the King of England:

A joyful, picaresque story, which begins with Baron Munchausen-like adventures and ends in tears and solitude. -- James Wood, TheLondon 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 Lessonsunfurls 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 A surreal and loquacious tale. . . . Billed as a fairy tale, the novel, at times, fancifully confounds expectations. . . and Hrabal's long, lyrical sentences (each chapter consists of a single paragraph) are not only eloquently constructed, but also as spirited al#K