The New York Times bestseller by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnès becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.