“With cunning wit, and elegiac sadness, Milan Kundera, the celebrated Czechoslovak emigre writer, expresses the trap the world has become.” - New York Times Book Review

“Brilliant . . . A work of high modernist playfulness and deep pathos.” - Janet Malcolm, New York Review of Books

“Kundera has raised the novel of ideas to a new level of dreamlike lyricism and emotional intensity.” - Jim Miller, Newsweek

“Kundera is a virtuoso . . . A work of the boldest mastery, originality, and richness.” - Elizabeth Hardwick, Vanity Fair

“Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” - People

“Encyclopaedic and epigrammatic, profound and playful, Kundera explores the intersection of the sublime and the ridiculous to give us an important chapter in the moral history of our time.” - Judges' citation, 1984 Los Angeles Times Book Prize

“The Unbearable Lightness of Being is both a love story and a novel of ideas. . . . Witty, seductive, serious . . . also full of feeling and enormously experienced in the tricky interplay of sex and politics. . . . One of the finest and most consistently interesting novelists in Europe or America, [Kundera] has a powerful tale to tell.” - Washington Post Book World

“A work of large scale and complexity, symphonically arranged. . . Political and philosophical, erotic and spiritual, funny and profound . . . There is no wiser observer now writing of the multifarious relations of men and women. . . . Kundera’s intelligence is both speculative and playful. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is his best novel yet.” - Wall Street Journal

"I return to the book again and again. Teacher, touchstone, style guide." - Taiye Selasi

“Kundera invents his own style. This novel achieves the most incredible literary fusion, blending myth, love story, musical score and political reflection. And it’s this liberty that creates a reading experience that is at once intellectual and sensual. . . . I read it every year and I always find something different. It’s an unclassifiable book: part novel, part treatise on philosophy and music, part essay. I don’t think a lifetime will be enough to unravel its mystery.”  - Leïla Slimani

A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel "the unbearable lightness of being."

A major achievement from one of the world's truly great writers, Milan Kundera's magnificent novel of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.