89 Words Followed by a Dream

Kundera’s final work, completed shortly before his death in 2023, is a collection of short prose pieces — stories, meditations, memories, philosophical reflections — gathered around the question of what it means to be at the end of a long life and a long literary career, to look back at the words you have written and find them both yours and not yours, to understand what you were saying when you didn’t yet know what you were saying.

89 Words Followed by a Dream is as concentrated and as formally precise as everything Kundera wrote — a small book of extraordinary density, in which each piece creates the maximum possible resonance from the minimum possible space. It is also, unmistakably, a farewell: the last voice of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, still asking the questions that have always mattered to him.

Essential for any Kundera devotee — the capstone of one of literature’s great bodies of work. Published by Faber & Faber.