Books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being
A Czech surgeon, his wife, and his mistress navigate love, betrayal, and the Prague Spring, in a philosophical novel about the weight and lightness of human choices.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Seven linked parts on forgetting, personal, political and erotic, as Czechs live under the Soviet occupation and remembering becomes an act of resistance.
The Joke
A young Czech man plays a joke that gets him expelled from the Communist Party, and the consequences unfold across decades in Kundera's darkly comic debut.
G.
The son of an Italian merchant and an American heiress, raised in England, grows up into G., a seducer, against the background of Europe before the First World War.
Asymmetry
Two stories that seem unconnected, a young editor's affair with a much older, famous writer and an Iraqi-American economist held at Heathrow airport, turn out to speak to each other.
Kairos
A love affair between a young East Berlin student and a much older married writer begins at a bus stop in 1986 and outlives the wall that surrounds them.
Closely Watched Trains
Miloš Hrma, a young apprentice at a small railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1945, has two problems: his inexperience with women and the German ammunition trains going through.
Saman
Four women and a priest navigate love, politics, and identity in Suharto-era Indonesia.
Conversations with Friends
A young woman begins an affair with an older, married writer while sorting out her own friendships, politics, and the gap between how she feels and what she says.
Samskara
When Naranappa, a Brahmin who broke every rule, dies in a south Indian village, the other Brahmins can't decide who should perform his last rites, and Praneshacharya, the most learned of them, faces his own crisis.
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Four friends, a novelist, her best friend, a warehouse worker and a political aide, navigate desire, friendship and exhaustion in a world that feels like it is ending.
Nausea
A philosopher in 1930s France discovers that the sheer existence of objects fills him with revulsion, and his diary charts the horror of a world without meaning.
The Age of Reason
Over two days in Paris in the summer of 1938, Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher who prizes his freedom above everything, tries to raise the money for his mistress's abortion.