"Miss Silver's Past" is an unqualified delight. It is a rapid, propulsive thriller, complete with a murder, a cynical (almost contemptible) narrator and a heroine who is as intellectually agile and as physically seductive as any encountered in recent fiction. But the book's value as an entertainment is only one aspect of its virtues. For the larger world in which all the hugger mugger takes place is that of a state-run publishing house in Czechoslovakia before the Dubcek thaw. The efforts of the head of the house to anticipate the theoretical objections of the Communist functionaries, the gyrations of his minions to remain ideologically pure and the efforts of the rebels on the staff to thwart the machine are really the heart of the book.

The author … writes in a style deliberately unliterary, jazzy and racy, and one which by its very nature mocks the portentous philistinism of the bureaucrats and the stiff language used to express it. If its underlying message were not so sinister in its implications, his black comedy could qualify as one of the funniest books of the year.