Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2022
360 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Paperback Original.
Publication Information
With a warm yet political humor, Ukraine's most famous novelist presents a balanced and illuminating portrait of modern conflict.
Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine's Grey Zone, the no-man's-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda that has been dragging on for years, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, a rival from his schooldays. With little food and no electricity, under constant threat of bombardment, Sergeyich's one remaining pleasure is his bees. As spring approaches, he knows he must take them far from the Grey Zone so they can collect their pollen in peace. This simple mission on their behalf introduces him to combatants and civilians on both sides of the battle lines: loyalists, separatists, Russian occupiers and Crimean Tatars. Wherever he goes, Sergeyich's childlike simplicity and strong moral compass disarm everyone he meets. But could these qualities be manipulated to serve an unworthy cause, spelling disaster for him, his bees and his country?
National Book Critics Circle Awards, 2022
"A gentle story of survival in a war-scarred land." —Kirkus Reviews
"[H]eartwarming and bittersweet...The old-fashioned, ambulatory story slows to a crawl by the end, but Kurkov's well-crafted characters make it all worthwhile. It adds up to a wistful elegy for a nation being slowly torn apart." —Publishers Weekly
"A latter-day Bulgakov ... A Ukrainian Murakami." —Phoebe Taplin, Guardian
"A post-Soviet Kafka." —Colin Freeman, 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." —Ian Sansom, Spectator
"This time, the Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin, known for his brilliantly dark humor, has written a modern-day odyssey, with a return that is ambiguously hopeful." —India Lewis, Arts Desk
"Strange and mesmerizing ... 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." —John Thornhill, Financial Times
"A warm and surprisingly funny book from Ukraine's greatest living novelist." —Charlie Connelly, New European
"Carries top notes of Beckett and Pinter, along with a slug of Kafka." —Strong Words, One of the Top 20 Books of the Year
"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." —Uilleam Blacker, Times Literary Supplement
This information about Grey Bees was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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 than75,000 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.
Boris Dralyuk is an award-winning translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He taught Russian literature for a number of years at UCLA and at the University of St Andrews. He is a co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, and has translated Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, as well as Kurkov's The Bickford Fuse. In 2020 he received the inaugural Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from the Washington Monthly.
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