Milan Kundera, the Czech author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and perennial candidate for the Nobel prize in literature, will publish his first novel in 13 years this summer.

Faber will release Kundera’s The Festival of Insignificance, translated from the original French by Linda Asher, on 18 June. The short work was first published in Italy in 2013, and has since topped charts in Italy, Spain and France.

“No, dear cynics, the novel is not dead,” ran a review in L’Express last year. “We have in France one of the greatest contemporary writers. He is called Milan Kundera, and you must read his new book as soon as possible – it could be his last, and it is magnificent, sunny, profound and funny.”

This publication will be the work’s first release in English. Kundera’s previous novel, Ignorance, was published in English in 2002 and in French in 2000.

Faber described the new book as a “wryly comic yet deeply serious glance at the ultimate insignificance of life and politics, told through the daily lives of four friends in modern-day Paris”. Said chief executive Stephen Page: “It feels incredibly relevant to the world we live in now. It’s very funny, and also quite surreal … It’s hard with an author of Kundera’s stature to talk about his best work, but this is a significant novel, an important work.”

Born in 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Kundera has now lived in France for more than 40 years. He has won acclaim for novels including The Joke (1967), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) – “Kundera’s novel seems as relevant now as it did when it was first published,” wrote John Banville in 2004 – and Immortality (1991), which were all originally released in Czech. His 1984 play Jacques and His Master, and later novels, including Ignorance (2002), were written in French.

“One is torn between profound pleasure in the novel’s execution and wonder at the pain that inspired it,” wrote Ian McEwan of Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, while the Sunday Times called Ignorance “one of the best novels yet by one of the best novelists alive”.

Kundera is named annually as a key contender for the literary world’s greatest honour, the Nobel prize. “I genuinely believe him to be a great of the 20th century, who will be read for ever,” said Page. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being is hugely read – it’s part of the canon. But there is such an engagement with all of his work – it feels compelling now, as much as it did in the 1980s when he came into more popular view.”

Page would not comment on whether the release of a new novel could put Kundera in contention for this year’s Nobel. “The Nobel is the Nobel,” he said. “The work stands for itself – a body of writing that will be read for ever, so individual and so original. He has such a grasp of the realities of life.”

The US edition of The Festival of Insignificance will be released by HarperCollins on 23 June.