About the Author

Born near Leningrad in 1961, ANDREY KURKOV was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist. He received "hundreds of rejections" and was a pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than 75,000 copies of his books in a single year. His novel Death and the Penguin, his first in English translation, became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. As well as writing fiction for adults and children, he has become known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media. His work of reportage, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, was published in 2014, followed by the novel The Bickford Fuse (MacLehose Press, 2016). He lives in Kiev with his British wife and their three children.

Reviews

A latter-day Bulgakov . . . A Ukrainian Murakami.
*Guardian.*

A post-Soviet Kafka.
*Daily Telegraph.*

Kurkov draws us with deceptive ease into a dense complex world full of wonderful characters.
*Michael Palin.*

A kind of Ukrainian Kurt Vonnegut
*Spectator.*

This time, the Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin, known for his brilliantly dark humour, has written a modern-day odyssey, with a return that is ambiguously hopeful.
*Arts Desk*

Strange and mesmerising . . . In spare prose, Ukraine's most famous novelist unsparingly examines the inhuman confusions of our modern times and the longing of the warm-hearted everyman that is Sergeyich for the rationality of the natural world.
*Financial Times*

A warm and surprisingly funny book from Ukraine's greatest living novelist.
*New European Books of the Year*

Carries top notes of Beckett and Pinter, along with a slug of Kafka.
*Strong Words.*

Sergey is at once a war-weary adventurer and a fairy-tale innocent . . . His naive gaze allows Kurkov to get to the heart of a country bewildered by crisis and war, but where kindness can still be found . . . Translated by Boris Dralyuk with sensitivity and ingenuity.
*Times Literary Supplement*