If you want something a little bit different, a little bit zany, dark, comic and absurd, then this is for you. At its core is the search for Misha the penguin, sadly abandoned in Death and the Penguin and although completely different, this has a feel of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels about it, only it’s the Russian mafia that our hero must confront.
Viktor - last seen in Death and the Penguin fleeing Mafia vengeance on an Antarctica-bound flight booked for Penguin Misha - seizes a heaven-sent opportunity to return to Kiev with a new identity. Clear now as to the enormity of abandoning Misha, then convalescent from a heart-transplant, Viktor determines to make amends. Viktor falls in with a Mafia boss who engages him to help in his election campaign, then introduces him to men who might further his search for Misha, said to be in a private zoo in Chechnya. What ensues is for Viktor both a quest and an odyssey of atonement, and, for the reader, an experience as rich, topical and illuminating as Death and the Penguin.
Andrey Kurkov was born in St Petersburg in 1961 and now lives in Kiev. He studied at the Foreign Language Institute in Kiev and has worked as a journalist and film cameraman. He now writes screenplays and has published four novels and four books for children.
