You’re supposed to go down to the shelters, but not everyone does. According to Nielsen Book data, sales of his books in translation in the UK are up more than 800%. He has a weekly slot on BBC Radio 4 – Letter From Ukraine, a personal account of his daily life. He has invitations to speak all over the world, in person and on Zoom. As Ukraine’s most famous and successful living writer (he has been described as “the Ukrainian Murakami”) – and the writer most translated into English, not to mention more than 30 other languages – suddenly, he is in demand at the worst time and for the worst reasons. Over the past month, Kurkov, 60, has found himself in an unusual and unexpected position.
Photograph: Mykhaylo Palinchak/SOPA Images/Rex/Shutterstock Readers may find themselves rooting even harder for Viktor this time, as he presses forward on his odyssey under even more dangerous circumstances, in another brilliantly rich and topical book from a contemporary Russian master.The remains of a shopping centre in Kyiv. And it’s a tale told once again in a style that’s part Bulgakov and part Hitchcock, simultaneously funny and ominous, nearly absurd and all-too-real. It once again lands Viktor in league with a series of criminals and corrupt officials, each of whom know something of what happened to Misha, and each of whom are willing to pass that information along if Viktor will just help them with one more job. It’s a search that will take Viktor across the Ukraine to Moscow and back, vividly depicting a troubled landscape. Now available for the first time in the US, Penguin Lost sees Viktor grab at the opportunity to return to Kiev incognito and launch an intensive, guilt-wracked search for Misha. But until now, fans haven’t been able to read the sequel and find out what happened to Viktor and his silent cohort, the penguin Misha, whom Viktor was forced to abandon at the end of the novel while fleeing Mafia vengeance.Īdmirers need wait no longer. Andrey Kurkov’s first book to be published in English, Death and the Penguin, was hailed by leading critics in the US and the UK as “a tragicomic masterpiece” ( The Daily Telegraph) of suspense about life on the crime-riddled streets of an impoverished, post-Soviet Kiev.
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