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  • Published: 15 May 2014
  • ISBN: 9780981955735
  • Imprint: Archipelago
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 260
  • RRP: $35.00

Harlequin's Millions

A Novel



A poignant, hilarious, and profound novel by one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century: in a home for the elderly, a clutch of eccentric characters reminisce about their lives and their changing country.

Cover art by Paul Klee -- "Die Sängerin L. als Fiordiligi" (1923-39)

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

  • Published: 15 May 2014
  • ISBN: 9780981955735
  • Imprint: Archipelago
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 260
  • RRP: $35.00

About the author

Bohumil Hrabal

Bohumil Hrabal was born in 1914 in Brno-Zidenice, Moravia. He received a degree in Law from Prague's Charles University, and lived in Prague since the late 1940s. In the 1950s he worked as a manual laborer in the Kladno ironworks, from which he drew inspiration for his "hyper-realist" texts he was writing at that time. He won international acclaim for such books as I Served the King of England and Too Loud a Solitude. Hrabal is considered, along with Jaroslav Hasek and Karel Capek, as one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century, and perhaps the most important in the post-war period. In February 1997 he flew out of his hospital window never to return.

Also by Bohumil Hrabal

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Praise for Harlequin's Millions

"Czechoslovakia's greatest living writer." --Milan Kundera

"Hrabal, to my mind, is one of the greatest living European prose writers." --Philip Roth, 1990

"There are pages of queer magic unlike anything else currently being done with words." --The Guardian

"Hrabal is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and hushed tenderness of detail." --Julian Barnes

"What Hrabal has created is an informal history of the indomitable Czech spirit. And perhaps ... the human spirit." --The Times