100,000+ Books, Games & Puzzles in-stock ๐Ÿ‡ณ๐Ÿ‡ฟ

Overnight NZ-wide delivery ๐Ÿš€ Thank you for supporting our 100% NZ-owned bookstore โค๏ธ

Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead

Faber Stories
Series: Faber Stories
3.69 goodreads logo

Ratings/reviews counts are updated frequently.

Check link for latest rating.
( 917 ratings, 109 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
In Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead by Milan Kundera, the narrative explores themes of nostalgia and the passage of time, as characters grapple with the complexities of memory and identity. Set in a reflective tone, the book examines the intricate connections between the past and present, offering a profound meditation on human relationships and the inevitable march of time.
Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$1699
AVAILABLE WITH SUPPLIER Ships from our Auckland warehouse within 4-6 weeks

Found a better price? Request a price match

Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

You might enjoy this book if you appreciate stories that delve into the nuances of human emotion and the interplay between memory and identity. This narrative, penned by Milan Kundera, offers an introspective look at the complexities of ageing and the inevitable passage of time, inviting readers to ponder life's transience and the overlapping layers of personal history.

Book Hero thinking about your next read

Faber 90th Stories brings together some of our finest short stories, past, present and future.

Faber 90th Stories brings together some of our finest short stories, past, present and future.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

A chance encounter leads a man to spend the afternoon with an older woman, now a widow, who escaped him fifteen years earlier. Neither of them doubts that the day will end in disgust, but for one intimate moment each finds a way to overcome mortality.

Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead, written in 1969 before Milan Kundera was known to English-speaking readers, renders male and female characters as painful equals. This story prompted Philip Roth to admire its 'detached Chekhovian tenderness'.

Series: Faber Stories

View all
  • Mr Salary
    Mr Salary by Sally Rooney is a captivating novella that delves deep into the complexities of love, loss, and unspoken desires. The story follows Sukie, a young woman who once moved in with Nathan following the death of her mother and the challenging relationship with her father. Now, as they reunite years later, they find themselves at the precipice of...
    Paperback
    $1699
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Forester's Daughter
    The evening is fine. In the sky, a few early stars are shining of their own accord. She watches the dog licking the bowl clean. This dog will break her daughter's heart, she's sure of it. The Forester's Daughter by Claire Keegan takes us into the heart of the Wicklow countryside, exploring the life of the farming family of Victor...
    Paperback
    $999
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Dante and the Lobster
    Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all.It is not. Dante and the Lobster is the first of the linked short stories in Samuel Beckett's first book, More Pricks Than Kicks. Published in 1934, its style was recognisably indebted to that of his mentor, James Joyce, and crammed with linguistic texture and allusion that Beckett later shed....
    Paperback
    $1699
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Victim
    On the whole, it was easier than I had expected. Only once did I feel myself at risk. That was when the Inspector suddenly intervened. He said in a harsh voice: 'He married your wife, didn't he? Took her away from you some people might say. Nice piece of goods, too, by the look of her. Didn't you feel any...
    Paperback
    $999
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Come Rain or Come Shine
    When Ray turns up to visit his old university friends Charlie and Emily, he's given a special task: to be so much his useless self that he makes Charlie look good by comparison. But Ray has his own buried feelings to contend with. Decades earlier, he and Emily would listen to jazz when they were alone, and now, as Sarah...
    Paperback
    $1699
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Cheater's Guide to Love
    You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda [...] You try it all, but one day she will simply sit up in bed and say, No more. In Yunior, a Dominican-American writer and Harvard professor, Junot Diaz has created an irresistibly erratic protagonist, who sweeps you...
    Paperback
    $1299
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead
    A chance encounter leads a man to spend the afternoon with an older woman, now a widow, who escaped him fifteen years earlier. Neither of them doubts that the day will end in disgust, but for one intimate moment each finds a way to overcome mortality. Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead, written in 1969 before...
    Paperback
    $1699
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Paradise
    An unnamed protagonist is on holiday with her new, much-married lover, in the company of the monstrously rich. How long would she last? It would be uppermost in all their minds. Each day, while the others are out at sea, she is taught to swim. Eventually, she will be expected to perform. The pressure mounts; it is only a matter...
    Paperback
    $1699
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Shielding of Mrs Forbes
    Thinking Betty was in the bath Graham was watching a late-night programme on Channel 4 called 'Footballers with Their Shirts Off' when she unexpectedly came in on the trail of the hairdryer. 'I didn't know you were interested in football,' said Betty. No one must ever find out that Graham is 'not the marrying sort'. Certainly not his wife, or...
    Paperback
    $1699
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Terrific Mother
    Adrienne is living in a puritanical age, when the best compliment a childless woman can get is: You'd make a terrific mother. That's when she goes to her friends' Labour Day picnic and accidentally kills their baby. The shock of this scene is expertly packed into two brief paragraphs. What follows is Adrienne's retreat from life and her attempt to...
    Paperback
    Sold Out
  • The Country Funeral
    "My only concern," John McGahern once said, "is that I get the sentence right and describe my world clearly and deeply." The Country Funeral witnesses three brothers, John, Philly, and Fonsie Ryan, as they travel west from Dublin to Gloria Bogโ€”the heart of the territory where so many of McGahern's stories take placeโ€”to attend the funeral of their uncle. Depicting...
    Paperback
    Sold Out
  • Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom
    Lips the colour of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like 'guilt, and guilt, and guilt': these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom. But what is the ninth kingdom? she asks a kind-seeming lady in her carriage. It is the kingdom of the frozen...
    Paperback
    Sold Out

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead by Milan Kundera is often noted for its contemplative exploration of themes like memory, identity, and change. The book has been praised for its insightful narrative style and emotional depth, capturing the complexities of human experience. Critiques have highlighted Kundera's ability to weave philosophical reflections with compelling storytelling, making it a reflective and thought-provoking read in the realm of general fiction.

Book Hero reading reviews

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780571356904

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 17 October 2019

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Faber & Faber

Edition: Main

Contributors:

  • Translated by Suzanne Rappaport
  • Translated by Suzanne Rappaport
  • Translated by Suzanne Rappaport

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 3.0mm

Width: 111.0mm

Height: 160.0mm

Weight: 38g

Pages: 48

About the Author

The French-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in the Czech Republic and has lived in France since 1975. He is the author of the internationally acclaimed and bestselling novels The Joke, Life is Elsewhere, The Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves - all originally in Czech. His more recent novels, Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance,as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

Also by Milan Kundera

View all
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being
    The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is a profound exploration of love, politics, and existential philosophy set against the backdrop of 1960s Prague. The novel revolves around the entwined lives of four main characters: Tomรกลก, a successful surgeon and notorious womaniser; Tereza, his faithful wife; Sabina, a free-spirited artist and Tomรกลก's mistress; and Franz, a compassionate professor who...
    Paperback
    $2500
    Elsewhere:
    $2799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Identity
    Sometimes - perhaps only for an instant - we fail to recognise a companion; for a moment their identity ceases to exist, and thus we come to doubt our own. The effect is at its most acute in a couple where our existence is given meaning by our perception of a lover, and theirs of us. With his astonishing skill...
    Paperback
    $2799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Ignorance
    In Ignorance, Milan Kundera takes up the complex and emotionally charged theme of exile and creates from it a literary masterpiece. A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their Czech homeland in the early 1990s after twenty years of self-imposed exile. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted by...
    Paperback
    $2799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Festival of Insignificance
    Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realismโ€”that's The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who know Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the unserious in a novel is...
    Paperback
    $2600
    Elsewhere:
    $2799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Immortality
    This breathtaking, reverberating survey of human nature finds Kundera still attempting to work out the meaning of life without losing his acute sense of humour. It is one of those great unclassifiable masterpieces that appear once every twenty years or so. 'It will make you cleverer, maybe even a better lover. Not many novels can do that.' โ€” Nicholas Lezard,...
    Paperback
    $2499
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Laughable Loves
    Laughable Loves is a collection of stories that first appeared in print in Prague before 1968, but was then banned. The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with the complex erotic games and stratagems employed by women and especially men as they try to come to terms with needs and impulses that can start a terrifying train...
    Paperback
    $2799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Life is Elsewhere
    Life is Elsewhere features a budding poet and his adoring mother at the heart of the story. This early novel by Milan Kundera explores their relationship intricately and thoughtfully, offering a profound narrative that delves into the complexities of creativity and maternal influence.
    Paperback
    $2600
    Elsewhere:
    $2799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • 89 Words followed by Prague, A Disappearing Poem
    89 Words, published in 1985, is an expanded version of the dictionary of sorts that readers encountered in The Art of the Novel, and comprises a fascinating and rigorous interrogation of what exile, life in another language, and the betrayals of translations entail. Prague, A Disappearing Poem, dating from 1980, meditates on questions of the culture of the 'small nation'...
    Hardback
    $2999
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Slowness
    Slowness was Milan Kundera's first novel written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows him through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated in time by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and ridiculous. As Kundera's readers would expect, Slowness is at the same time a formidable display of existential analysis....
    Paperback
    $2600
    Elsewhere:
    $2799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
    This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single, unique situation the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance. It is a book about laughter and...
    Paperback
    $2799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Joke
    The Joke, Milan Kundera's first novel, gained him a huge following in his own country and launched his worldwide literary reputation. In his foreword, Kundera explains why this completely revised translation is the definitive edition of his work. 'It is impossible to do justice here to the subtleties, comedy, and wisdom of this very beautiful novel. The author of The...
    Paperback
    $2799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being
    International Bestseller - Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction "Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond." -- People In The...
    Paperback
    $5100
    Available
    Ships in 2-3 weeks

More from General Fiction

View all
  • The Wedding People
    'BEST READ OF THE YEAR SO FAR' THE TIMES 'BOOKS AS FUN AS THIS ONE ARE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN' GUARDIAN Phoebe Stone arrives at a grand beachside hotel in Rhode Island wearing her best dress and least comfortable shoes. Immediately she is mistaken for one of the wedding people โ€” but she's actually the only guest at the Cornwall...
    Paperback
    $2399
    Elsewhere:
    $2799
    (3)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Throne of Glass Box Set (Paperback)
    Enter the realm. Unleash the darkness. Live the legend. Discover the worldwide phenomenon of the #1 New York Times-bestselling Throne of Glass series in this gorgeous 8-book box set! In a land without magic, an assassin is summoned to the castle. She has no love for the vicious king who rules from his throne of glass, but she has not...
    Set
    $12400
    Elsewhere:
    $15500
    (6)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Score
    Welcome to Briar U! Get ready for your newest obsession... Discover the addictive world of the Off-Campus series from The Queen of Hockey Romance, Elle Kennedy! Read The Score now for the perfect friends with benefits romance! He knows how to score, on and off the ice... Allie Hayes is in crisis mode. With graduation looming, she still doesn't have...
    Paperback
    $2499
    Elsewhere:
    $2799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Theo of Golden
    THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING PHENOMENON'For anything to be truly good, there must be love in it. Nothing is what it's supposed to be if love is not at the core.' One morning, a stranger arrives in the town of Golden. No one knows who he is or where he came fromโ€ฆHis name is Theo and he's arrived there by chance โ€“...
    Paperback
    $2899
    Elsewhere:
    $3499
    (5)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Goal
    Welcome to Briar U!Get ready for your newest obsession . . . Discover the addictive world of the Off-Campus series from The Queen of Hockey Romance, Elle Kennedy!Read The Goal now for the perfect forced proximity romance! She's good at achieving her goals . . . College senior Sabrina James has her whole future planned out: graduate from college, kick...
    Paperback
    $2499
    Elsewhere:
    $2799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Mistake
    Welcome to Briar U! Get ready for your newest obsession . . . Discover the addictive world of the Off-Campus series from The Queen of Hockey Romance, Elle Kennedy! Read The Mistake now for the perfect second chance romance! He's a player in more ways than one . . . College junior John Logan can get any girl he wants....
    Paperback
    $2499
    Elsewhere:
    $2799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • New Release
    On Mystic Lake
    One of the greatest storytellers of our time - Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing Annie Colwater's only child has just left home for school in England. On that same day, her husband of twenty years confesses that he's in love with a younger woman. Left alone in the beautiful California house which was once a home, Annie...
    Paperback
    $3100
    Elsewhere:
    $3800
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Project Hail Mary
    Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, the SUNDAY TIMES and NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author of The Martian, offers a gripping new adventure in hard science fiction. With endorsement from notable figures such as Barack Obama and a slew of five-star reviews, this novel promises a thrilling and intellectually stimulating journey. Ryland Grace, a lone astronaut, finds himself on a...
    Paperback
    $2399
    Elsewhere:
    $2400
    (4)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Legacy
    Welcome to Briar U! Get ready for your newest obsession . . . Discover the addictive world of the Off-Campus series from the Queen of Hockey Romance, Elle Kennedy! Read The Legacy now for the much-anticipated answer to the question: Where are they now? Four stories. Four couples. Three years of real life after graduation . . . A wedding....
    Paperback
    $2499
    Elsewhere:
    $2799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • New Release
    Yesteryear
    A BOLD AND BITING SATIRE. WILL HAVE YOU GASPING TO THE FINAL PAGE โ€” Nita Prose WICKEDLY FUNNY, BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN AND FRIGHTENINGLY PERCEPTIVE โ€” Abigail Dean INVENTIVE, ADDICTIVE, A WILD RIDE โ€” Ashley Audrain SHOT THROUGH WITH HUMOUR AND LACED WITH DARKNESS โ€” Clare Mackintosh The Stepford Wives meets The Handmaid's Tale โ€” Hannah Deitch My name was Natalie Heller...
    Paperback
    $2999
    Elsewhere:
    $3699
    (2)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • New Release
    Land
    Inspired by the mapping of Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, Land, theย new novel from the author of Hamnet, is at once intimate and epic: a portrait of a family navigating a legacy of upheaval and loss with love and hope. On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomรกs and his reluctant son,ย Liam, are working for the great...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Elsewhere:
    $3799
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Signed Bookplate
    New Release
    Light Wielder
    THE EPIC CONCLUSION TO METAL SLINGER, AKA THE BOOK WITH THE PLOT TWIST THAT BROKE THE INTERNET Sail the seas. Master the blade. Protect your heart. What would you do to have it all? READERS ARE GOING WILD FOR *METAL SLINGER* โ€˜The BEST plot twist to ever grace my Kindleโ€™ โญโญโญโญโญ โ€˜The author is a mastermind. Romantasy is back!!!!โ€™ โญโญโญโญโญ...
    Paperback
    $3199
    Elsewhere:
    $3799
    In Stock
    Ships today

Why buy from us?

Book Hero is not a chain store or big box retailer. We're an independent 100% NZ-owned business on a mission to help more Kiwis rediscover a love of books and reading!

Service & Delivery

Service & Delivery

Our warehouse in Auckland holds over 100,000 books, toys, board games and puzzles in-stock so you're not waiting for your order to arrive from overseas.

Auckland Bookstore

Auckland Bookstore

We're primarily an online store, but for your convenience you can pick up your order for free from our bookstore, which is right next door to our warehouse in Hobsonville.

Our Gifting Service

Our Gifting Service

Books make wonderful thoughtful gifts and we're here to help with gift-wrapping and cards. We can even send your gift directly to your loved one.