Death and the Penguin

Andrey Kurkov

juuni 2011 · Melville House

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"No summary can do justice to the strange appeal of this unusual, short book, which is at once a crime novel, a comic novel and a serious political satire on contemporary Ukraine." —Anne Applebaum, The Wall Street Journal


With the collapse of the Soviet Union, newly-free Ukraine is a shell-shocked land . . .

In poverty-and-violence-wracked Kyiv, unemployed writer Viktor Zolotaryov leads a down-and-out life with his only friend, Misha, a penguin that he rescued when the local zoo started getting rid of animals it couldn't feed. Even more nerve-wracking for Victor: a local mobster has taken a shine to Misha and wants to borrow him for events.

But Viktor thinks he’s finally caught a break when he lands a well-paying job at the Kyiv newspaper writing “living obituaries” of local dignitaries—articles to be filed for use when the time comes.

The only thing is, the time always seems to come as soon as Viktor finishes writing the article. Slowly understanding that his own life may be in jeopardy, Viktor also realizes that the only thing that might be keeping him alive is his penguin.

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Andrey Kurkov, born in St. Petersburg in 1961, now lives in Kiev. Having graduated from the Kiev Foreign Languages Institute, he worked for some time as a journalist, did his military service as a prison warder at Odessa, then became a film cameraman, writer of screenplays, and author of critically acclaimed and popular novels. He is the author of Penguin Lost, a sequel to Death and the Penguin, and The Case of the General's Thumb.

George Bird has translated extensively from German and Russian. In 1986 he won the Pluto Crime Prize for his novel Death in Leningrad.