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 for "Too 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 Independent" on Sunday Praise for "I Served the King of England" "A joyful, picaresque story, which begins with Baron Munchausen-like adventures and ends in tears and solitude." — James Wood, The "London 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 Lessons" unfurls 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