Death and the Penguin

A struggling Kyiv writer keeps a penguin as a flatmate. The penguin is depressed. The writer accidentally becomes an obituarist for people who are not yet dead. What follows is at once very funny and very dark — a portrait of post-Soviet Ukraine that captures something true about living in a country where the rules keep changing and absurdity is a survival strategy. Kurkov is a gateway into Ukrainian literature and a writer who deserves a much larger audience.