"No question about it. The most important novel published in Britain this year was Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a whirling dance of a book by a Czech novelist who is fully the equal of the great satirist Jaroslav Hašek, creator of The Good Soldier Švejk. Kundera is a self-confessed hedonist in a world beset by politics, and his marvellous novel mingles a hedonist's love of eroticism, fantasy and fun with knife-sharp political satire (it recounts, for example, the case of a Communist leader who is so thoroughly erased from history that nothing is left of him but his hat). A masterpiece, full of angels, terror, ostriches and love?

Salman Rushdie in the Sunday Times

"That he should embrace his subject with so light and compassionate a touch, dress it as comedy, express it in a simple yet sinuously intelligent prose, is evidence of supreme control and one is torn between profound pleasure in the novel's execution and wonder at the pain that inspired it...The novel is so rich in incident and speculation that I found myself reading parts out loud to anyone who would listen..

lan McEwan in the Observer