This is a shamelessly clever book – at times a little cold – but exhilaratingly subversive and funny. As a writer, it is the skill with which Kundera opens up that gap between perception and reality that I admire so much. Can Franz begin to understand why Sabina is excited by betrayal, or Tereza appreciate what drives Tomas from conquest to conquest? They have been shaped by such different experiences they are unable to interpret each other's feelings and actions – with comic, sometimes tragic consequences. It's a tapestry of ideas woven through the lives of the characters by the teasing voice of the author-narrator. Published in Kundera's exile in 1984, The Unbearable Lightness of Being explores the idea of 'lightness' and heaviness – emptiness and meaning – through the story of two couples Tomas the surgeon and womaniser who loves his wife, Tereza, and Sabina, a painter conducting an affair with a Swiss lecturer, Franz. And the church seemed as interested in sex as I was. I chased and caught girls but spent many hours in prayer too. I read Graham Greene and Iris Murdoch, and was as intoxicated by Goody Pangall's red hair as the unfortunate Dean in Golding's study of obsession, The Spire. From too much sexual freedom she finds moral indifference generated.

Terezas thoughts in one scene as she leaves Geneva are that she cannot stand the lightness of life there and must return to the land of the weak in Prague.

I was brought up in a Lincolnshire market town, went to the local grammar at 16 I was a communist, by 17 a Roman Catholic. Consciousness as will has no grip on being as a way of life. It was heady stuff, original and subversive. Fresh from the English classics at Oxford and finding my feet on a south London rag, a little sheltered, very impressionable, I was drawn into a restless world of ideas and characters in which nothing is how we first perceive it, and meaning and motive are bent like light refracting through a prism. I can't remember precisely when I read my first Kundera or which it was, because once I had started I couldn't stop until I emptied them all.

The unbearable lightness of being book