Journalist and author Florence Noiville and her husband shared a long friendship with the Kundera couple. Thus, scenes of sly complicity, midday meals at Touquet, visits to the couple's apartment, café meetings, the unbearable nostalgia of trivial chatter at a country restaurant, fleeting moments and sensations are captured and brought to life with tenderness in this book, reflecting the (lived) work and the (novelistic) life of Milan Kundera.

The Central European cultural root that permeates Kundera's thought and action is vividly highlighted here: fragments from texts and discussions, memories, a travel diary from Bohemia, and numerous photographs are gathered with a single goal: to inspire in the reader the desire to (re)discover one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.

Both a writer and a musician, Milan Kundera, an enemy of public gossip and tedious biography, found in Florence Noiville a pen capable of revealing his ironic, detached gaze and his great capacity for depth, as well as those jokes with which we all nourish our dreams and lies.