Death and the Penguin

"No summary can do justice to the strange appeal of this unusual, short book, which is at once a crime novel, a comic novel and a serious political satire on contemporary Ukraine." —Anne Applebaum , The Wall Street Journal With the collapse of the Soviet Union, newly-free Ukraine is a shell-shocked land . . . In poverty-and-violence-wracked Kyiv, unemployed writer Viktor Zolotaryov leads a down-and-out life with his only friend, Misha, a penguin that he rescued when the local zoo started ge