Penguin Lost

Description

'A darkly comic and offbeat journey. P-p-p-pick it up!' - Scotsman 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, 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.

Delicious - when Viktor finally finds Misha it is as if Woody Allen had gone to meet Kurtz * Spectator * There is more magic in his realism than in a library of witches and wizards * Scotland on Sunday * Rich, authentic and entertaining * New Statesman * This grotesque post-Soviet world is tinged with Dostoevskian absurdity * Independent * Death and the Penguin was praised for its brutal humour, tender humanity and all-out guts. Penguin Lost is a sequel equally superlative and twice as readable * Ink *