A deadpan post-Soviet noir about Viktor, an obituary writer in Kyiv, and Misha, the depressed penguin he has adopted from the local zoo.

When Viktor is hired to write advance obituaries for prominent public figures, his quiet life starts to tilt into something stranger and more dangerous: the people he writes about begin dying, and power, money and violence start edging closer to his apartment.

The book is bleak, funny, chilly and oddly tender all at once — a political thriller with the emotional temperature of a fridge light. It has the shape of crime fiction but moves like existential comedy: bureaucracy, loneliness, corruption, friendship, black-market arrangements, and one very melancholy penguin standing in for an entire moral climate. Good for readers of Bulgakov, Gogol, Kafka-lite absurdism, eastern European noir, and anyone who likes their satire understated rather than shouty.

Vintage paperback, published 2003. First published in Russian as Smert postoronnego in 1996; first published in Great Britain by The Harvill Press in 2001. Translated by George Bird. Good second-hand condition.