Series:

Melville International Crime

3 total works

Cover of Penguin Lost

Penguin Lost

by Andrey Kurkov

Published 4 March 2004

'Rich, authentic and entertaining' New Statesman

Discover the darkly funny follow-up to cult classic Death and the Penguin

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.

Cover of Death and the Penguin

Death and the Penguin

by Andrey Kurkov

Published 22 March 2001
Victor is depressed: his lover has dumped him, his short stories are too short, and the light has gone off in his dingy apartment. His only companion is Misha, the penguin he rescued from Kiev's zoo, when it couldn't feed the animals anymore. Misha is the silent witness to Victor's despair. Misha joins in his celebration -- fish and vodka -- when Victor's luck seems to turn: he is commissioned to write obituaries under the pen name "A Group of Friends". The weird thing is that the editor wants him to select subjects who are still alive, the movers and shakers of the new, post-Communist society. Pleased with Victor's work, the editor sends him his friend, also named Misha (from then onward known as Misha-non-penguin), who commissions Victor to write an obituary about one of his shady associates. After a job well done, Misha-non-penguin and Victor get drunk on vodka and Victor confesses that he is frustrated as an obituary writer: his subjects refuse to die. The next morning his most prominent one, a corrupt politician with Mafia ties and a mistress, is dead. The tide has turned.

Cover of The Case Of The General's Thumb
A Russian General is murdered. But why? And, more importantly, what has happened to his thumb? Viktor Slutsky, a young police lieutenant, is sent to investigate it. So, independently, is Nik Tsensky, a former military interpreter. We read in parallel their two stories as they travel across Europe, pawns in a much more complex game than they could possibly suspect. On the way they meet Sergey, a larger-than-life hit-man and hearse-driving sociopath, who has somehow acquired a deaf-and-dumb blonde girlfirend and a tortoise to whom he becomes devoted (a worthy anthropomorphic successor to Misha the Penguin, eponymous hero of his previous novel). As the two investigators gradually close in on the secret, they become involved in a battle between the Russian and the Ukranian secret services over the fabled KGB "Red Gold". Another brilliantly inventive black satire which will both enlighten and entertain.