Josef Skvorecky

A noble misfit investigates a powerful party figure in 1950s Czechoslovakia. His struggle against blackmail and betrayal leaves him determined to succeed where others have failed. Set in Stalinist Central Europe, GraveLarks is an intellectual thriller navigating the ambiguity between sado-masochism, black humour, political satire, murder and hope.

The Cowards (1958) is Josef Skvorecky's blackly comic tale of post-war politics that was immediately banned on publication. In 1945, in Kostelec,Danny is playing saxophone for the best jazz band in Czechoslovakia. Their trumpeter has just got out of a concentration camp, their bass player is only allowed in the band since he owns the bass, and the love of Danny's life is in love with somebody else. But Danny despairs most about the bourgeoisie patriots in his town playing at revolution in the face of the approaching Red Army - not least because it ruins the band's chance of any good gigs.

Boruvka is working as a parking-lot attendant in downtown Toronto, after a spectacular escape from a Czech prison which provoked an international scandal, when a young woman is murdered, perhaps in a spy coverup. Boruvka lends his years of experience and hard-won pessimism to the neophyte Canadians on the case (including his daughter, who works for a feminist detective agency). By having this story--his most riveting and funniest yet--narrated by the murdered woman's brother, an amiable WASP, Josef Skvorecky sets the Old World against the New, and pokes fun at the absurdities on both sides of our cultural divide. In the end, as an old war crime is avenged, the narrator discovers the source of Lieutenant Boruvka's mournful demeanour.

This autobiography in stories, When Eve Was Naked, takes us through a most remarkable life, from the innocence of prewar Prague through the horrors of the Nazi occupation and World War II. In the title story, narrated by Skvorecky's alter-ego Danny Smiricky, seven-year-old Danny falls in love for the first time; at sixteen he hides in a railway station and watches as his Jewish teacher is herded onto a train and taken away; and in 1968, as Russian tanks rolled into Prague, Skvorecky flees Czechoslovakia, taking Danny with him. In the collection's final stories, Danny begins his tenure as Professor Smiricky at a Canadian university and attempts to come to terms with the politically innocent and self-centered youth that flock to his courses

The Engineer of Human Souls is a labyrinthine comic novel that investigates the journey and plight of novelist Danny Smiricky, a Czech immigrant to Canada. As the novel begins, he is a professor of American literature at a college in Toronto. Out of touch with his young students, and hounded by the Czech secret police, Danny is let loose to roam between past and present, adopting whatever identity that he chooses or has been imposed upon him by History.

THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS spins its own story from the torn entrails of Central Europe. yet what emerges is comedy - clack, grimacing and explosively funny, as peculiarly middle European as the despairing wit of prague's own Franz Kafka' Time

The witness in 1948 to a baffling event labled by Catholic townspeople as a miracle and by the Communist Party as a fraud, cynical Czech Danny Smiricky finds himself drawn into an investigation of the event twenty years later during the 1968 Prague Spring

A pensive, conscience-stricken man driven to melancholy by the fiendish truths of murder, the Czechoslovak policeman Lieutenant Boruvka is a notable new member of the brilliant-eccentric-detective literary tradition. Twelve bizarre tales to be read as a continuous account involve theatrical people, musicians, and mountaineers, who lead the lieutenant, and the reader, on an ingenious chase through the paths of crime."

Chronicles Anton Dvorak's sojourn in America at the turn of the century, when he was persuaded by Jeannette Thurber to leave his native Bohemia and become director of her National Conservatory of Music