The Silver Bone

The first in a fine new series … Andrey Kurkov is often called Ukraine’s greatest living writer, and it is a gift for crime fiction fans that he writes in this genre * New York Times *Told with black humour and great narrative brio * The Sunday Times *Witty and enjoyable, Boris Dralyuk’s translation is playful and subtle … It promises rich storytelling in future instalments * Telegraph *Translated from the Russian by poet Boris Dralyuk, Kurkov’s prose is brisk but capacious, with a quiet flair … And though it is clear-eyed in its depiction of war’s sheer senselessness, The Silver Bone has an unusual poetic lightness too * Financial Times *A delightfully dark novel - refreshing, unique, comical * Historical Novel Society *Original and intriguing. Relocates the historical crime novel somewhere between Kafka and The Twilight Zone – Frank Tallis, author of the Liebermann Papers (Vienna Blood)Rich and compulsive, a modern classic in the making – Anna BaileyA Kyiv torn to pieces by WWI provides the backdrop for this fascinating series launch … With its earthy prose and stunning attention to detail, this stands apart * Publishers Weekly *Wildly enjoyable … A glorious aural portrait of a city in dangerous flux … I finished The Silver Bone wishing to read more * Guardian *A masterpiece * The Lady *A gripping historical thriller set in Kyiv in the aftermath of the Russian revolution … A book that has all the hallmarks of Kurkov at his best * New European *

Born near Leningrad in 1961, 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).