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Fifty years after the publication of The Cowards , Josef Skvorecky's seminal first novel, he returns to the fertile territory of his earlier fiction, his native Czech Republic, and to his old narrator and alter ego, Danny Smiricky.

Ordinary Lives centres on two reunions of Danny's grammar school, who graduated in 1943, during the Nazi occupation in World War II. Twenty years later, Danny and his classmates are indelibly scarred by the post-war communist regime, and their volatile reunion tests their politics and loyalties.

The second reunion takes place thirty years later, in 1993, not long after the last vestiges of Eastern European communism have been swept away. Woven throughout these encounters are several stories from Danny's past, as he looks back on a long and fraught life.

As in his very best work, Josef Skvorecky explores the defining moments of the twentieth century through the ordinary lives of his beloved characters, reminding us of the personal cost of the grand ideologies that have determined our history. Praise for Josef Skvorecky: "Josef Skovorecky is unquestionably an important writer, blending a great humorous talent with a restless, sustained, probing moral inquisitiveness."-- Times Literary Supplement

"Skvorecky displays the tongue-in-cheek irony that is common to many Eastern European writers, but his unique compassion, humanism and wisdom in the face of relentless, unspeakable political horror makes him consistently engaging and intriguing ...

[O]ne of the finest international writers of his generation."-- Publishers Weekly "

[A] magnificent writer and a hilarious observer of human folly." -- Newsweek

"Skvorecky writes with eloquence and wit." -- The New Yorker