The Engineer of Human Souls – Josef Skvorecky

During a phase of reading Eastern European émigrés, when Communist Bloc still existed, I came across this sprawling, thoughtful and entertaining novel.
 
Swinging between Danny’s former life in Czechoslovakia and a new one in Canada, it covers Skvorecky’s own wide-ranging preoccupations and experiences of very different societies and political regimes.
 
There aren’t so many books with such a provenance and it documents that certain time and place and mood.