Andrey Kurkov

Andrey Kurkov on Lost Soldiers

Described as "Ukraine's greatest living writer", we look forward to welcome back Andrey Kurkov for his third book book in his Kyiv Mystery Series.

A troop of Red Army soldiers has disappeared without a trace while visiting the Halytska bathhouse, their abandoned boots and uniforms the only proof that they ever existed.

Faced with such a fantastical conundrum, Samson must resort to a fantastical investigation method, but he discovers far more than he bargained for, and matters are further complicated by the human remains found in the stoves and the presence of a sinister religious cult in the city.

In the third of his Kyiv Mysteries, Andrey Kurkov, vividly depicts a city filled with political turbulence and eccentric characters - and draws ominous parallels with the present day.

Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist. He received "hundreds of rejections" and was a pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than 75,000 copies of his books in a single year. His novel Death and the Penguin became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. As well as writing fiction for adults and children, he has become known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media. His work of reportage, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev was followed by the novels The Bickford Fuse, Grey Bees, and Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv (longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023), as well as his non-fiction work Diary of an Invasion (2022).