Andrey Kurkov

We’ve long been proud to call Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov a friend of our shop. His cult classic noir satire “Death and the Penguin” was one of 6 original inductees in our perma-displayed “Hall of Fame” – a display reserved for books we perpetually love to recommend and that receive consistently incredible feedback from readers. Back in August 2011, Andrey came to Bath to speak about his then new novel “The Milkman in the Night”, an often hilarious, sometimes shocking novel of life and corruption in Kiev and rural Ukraine.

Our wonderful Bookshop Band wrote a couple of songs inspired by his work and performed them in front of Andrey and our audience – here they are playing the brilliant “Fortunes Never Kind”- https://vimeo.com/29258703. Later that night Andrey took to the keyboard himself and played a few Ukrainian folk tunes to wrap up the evening.

More recently Andrey drew attention, through his trademark biting literary satire, to the often overlooked hostility and low-burn warfare that’s been ongoing in occupied Crimea since 2014.  “Grey Bees” tells a tale of the two remaining occupants in a ruined border village, frenemies trying to dodge shells, find food and, in Sergeyich’s case, care for bees despite the chaos around them.

The dark humour in all of his work tends to resonate so well with British readers – perhaps never more so than in “A Matter of Death and Life” in which a man hires a hit-man because he can’t muster enough chutzpah to commit suicide.

We’ve shouted about Andrey’s writing and the insights his books can give us all into post-Communist Ukraine ever since we’ve been selling books, but never with such terrible reasons for doing so. If the current appalling news-flow from Ukraine has made you keen to try and understand the trials, tribulations and eccentricities of Ukraine, and occasionally to smile despite yourself, then look no further.

Throughout March we’ll donate all profits from the sales of any Andrey Kurkov books to the Ukraine Humanitarian Fund of the Disasters Emergency Committee. “Slava Ukraini!”