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by Andrey Kurkov
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.
"Andrey Kurkov is often called Ukraine's greatest living writer, and it is a gift for crime fiction fans that he writes in this genre. (Read "Death and the Penguin" and its sequels — they are a delight.)" —The New York Times
"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." —The Wall Street Journal
This information about Death and the Penguin (Melville International Crime) 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.
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.
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