From the celebrated novelist comes his autobiography in story form One of the most celebrated writers of our time, Skvorecky's books have been honoured all over the world for their passion, wry humour, insights into human and political frailties and breathtaking style. When Eve Was Naked is no exception. It is the ultimate collection of the Danny stories and as close to autobiography as Skvorecky will ever write. Organized chronologically into four parts, the stories reveal the important facets of this writer's life - childhood, the Second World War, the communist era in Czechoslovakia and the Canada years. From forced labour camps to the '68 Soviet invasion and from the politics of revolt to the craft of writing, Danny's life mirrors Skvorecky's own. While there is tragedy here, there is also joy and girls - beautiful, tempting, life-affirming girls. Lush, poignant and beautifully written, this is vintage Skvorecky.

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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