The Milkman in the Night

Description

A new masterpiece from the author of the cult classic Death and the Penguin. Semyon is disturbed. He has woken up in the living room with blood on his shirt, an angry wife and no idea where he was the night before. When this happens several mornings in a row, he realises he needs to investigate. After his friend Volodka follows him one night, they discover he's meeting a tall, blonde woman and accompanying her to her apartment. In the daytime he doesn't know this woman or where her apartment is and, odder yet, someone is watching Volodka watching Semyon. Meanwhile, there are some strange goings-on in Kiev - an unemployed sniffer-dog handler makes a dangerous discovery, a single mother is providing breast milk for an unusual recipient and a vengeful cat is on the loose...

Andrey Kurkov was born in St Petersburg in 1961. Having graduated from the Kiev Foreign Languages Institute, he worked for some time as a journalist, did his military service as a prison warder in Odessa, then became a film cameraman, writer of screenplays and author of critically acclaimed and popular novels.

A glorious, epic, eccentric and often hilarious satire, heavily tinged with Russian melancholy -- Kate Saunders * The Times * There is much to enjoy in this book. Kurkov works in the tradition of Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov, blending folkloric characters, magical realism and political satire to reveal a society riddled with greed, stupidity and corruption -- Marina Lewycka * Financial Times * Good-hearted and brutal at the same time, The Milkman in the Night is a complex, unsettling mixture of bleakness and warmth * Sunday Times * Kurkov is hugely talented * Time Out * This book is a joyride... Kurkov has a rollercoaster of fun between zig and zag. He defies the reader not to join him * Scotsman *