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

Kundera’s classic provoked a whole generation, encompassing passion and philosophy, body and soul, the Prague Spring and modern America, political acts and private desires, comedy and tragedy – in fact, all of human existence.

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