A MAN and a woman meet by chance at the airport as they prepare to return to their native Czechoslovakia, a country they abandoned 20 years earlier after Russian tanks rolled into the Czech capital, Prague.

For the woman, the meeting is electric; a re-encounter with a man she had met briefly more than 20 years before and never forgotten.

For the man, the woman is pleasant, interesting - and a complete stranger, all recollection of their ever having met before completely gone.

The complex, unsettling love story that develops is shot through with uncomfortable truths about the way we treat each other.

But it is merely the framework for what develops into an absorbing, thoughtful and searchingly true meditation on the nature of identity, memory and exile.

It is the yearning of the exile who returns to his roots to find home is no longer home that lingers - but on a deeper level the novel leaves you wondering what is the value of the lived moment if, once passed, it is completelyforgotten.

A compelling and thought-provoking new work by the great Czech writer Milan Kundera, author of The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting.

Updated: 10:11 Wednesday, November 20, 2002