The Wonderful Dog Times is, in the words of the author, the very successful and popular Czech writer Michal Viewegh, “a mostly happy look at a mostly unhappy period”. Viewegh also knows how to write about the unhappy period of totalitarianism with plenty of humor and irony. He uses irony to color both the tragic and banal conditions of the time and the characters in the novel. Kvido, whom we follow through his childhood and adolescence, becomes a writer and through his story we also get to know his family and his parents’ families. Viewegh thus composes a kind of modern family chronicle, the world of little people who do not sympathize with the regime. but do not actively oppose it either, as they have to make sure they survive. A masterful narrative that will surely captivate you.