The acclaimed author of the Governor General's Award-winning The Engineer of Human Souls returns with his first new novel in nearly a decade.
Fifty years after the publication of The Cowards, Josef Skvorecky's seminal first novel, he returns to the fertile territory of his earlier fictions, his native Czech Republic, and to his old narrator and alter ego, Danny Smiricky. Ordinary Lives, masterfully translated by Skvorecky's long-time collaborator Paul Wilson, takes as its subject two class reunions--the first in 1963, twenty years after the class graduated, and the second, thirty years on, in 1993. The pulse of the novel, however, is the "torrent of ungovernable thoughts" that plague Danny. Over the course of these two reunions, as loyalties are tested and secrets are revealed, the reader is taken on a journey back through Skvorecky's well-loved oeuvre. As the puzzle pieces of Danny's history, and the history of his classmates, fall into place, so too does a subtle history of the major ideologies of the 20th century--from Nazism to Communism to capitalism. As in his very best work, Josef Skvorecky explores the defining moments of the modern era through the ordinary lives of his beloved characters.
Beautifully written, slim but decidedly powerful, Ordinary Lives is a brilliant novel, and an apt culmination of a literary master's extraordinary career.

Josef Skvorecký was born in 1924 in Nachod, Bohemia, Czechoslovakia. He received his PhD in philosophy from Charles University in Prague in 1951. His earliest works, including The Cowards (1958), were banned by communist censors. He published novels, short stories and film scripts between 1963 and 1968, during a shift to more liberal political climate. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Skvorecký and his wife, Zdena Salivarová emigrated to Canada in 1969. Together with his wife, he ran 68 Publishers, which published, in both Czech and English translations, books that we banned in Communist Czechoslovakia. By the fall of the Soviet Union, 68 published had published over 220 works. Skvorecky published many books, including novels, poetry, non-fiction, as well as for film and television, among them The Engineer of Human Souls (1984), which received the Governor General's Award for fiction. Skvorecký was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, and was awarded the Order of the White Lion in the Czech Republic in 1990. Josef Skvorecký died in 2012.

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