In Josef Škvorecký's first novel written in English, the narrator lives in two radically dissimilar worlds: the exile world of the post-Communist Czech Republic where old feuds, treacherous betrayals, and friendships persevere; and the comfortable, albeit bland world of middle-class Canada. Murder intrudes upon both world. One features a young female sleuth, a college beauty queen, jealousy in the world of academia, and a neat conclusion. The other is a tragedy caused by evil social forces and philosophies, in which a web of lies insidiously entangles Sidonia, the narrator's wife. A brilliantly stylish tour de force in which the bright, sarcastic comedy of one tale sharply contrasts with the dark, elegiac bitterness of the other,Two Murders in My Double Life confirms Škvorecký's reputation as a versatile and engaging writer.

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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"Potent and deeply affecting . . . building slowly . . . to a powerful conclusion."—Michiko Kakutani,The New York Times

"Two Murders combines genres for which Škvorecký is well known: the thinly disguised autobiographical novel and the murder mystery . . . [He] has proved himself to be the preeminent Czech interpreter of the theme of home and exile, in his life and in his work."—Neil Bermel,The New York Times Book Review

"This novel . . . offers the reader both sides of an obscure and unsolvable story, the here and now inflected by the there and then, a complex bio-mystery about the Kafka-esque machinations of politics."—Aritha van Herk,The Globe and Mail(Toronto)

"What's remarkable is thatTwo Murders in My Double Life is the first work that Mr. Škvorecký has written in his adopted language, yet it contains all the subtle linguistic byplay that characterizes what he originally wrote in Czech."—Douglas Fetherling,The Ottawa Citizen