Diary of an Invasion - by Andrey Kurkov (Hardcover)

About the Book

"First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Mountain Leopard Press, an imprint of Welbeck Publishing Group."

Book Synopsis

One of the most important Ukrainian voices throughout the Russian invasion, the author of Death and the Penguin and Grey Bees collects his searing dispatches from the heart of Kyiv.

This journal of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv, is a remarkable record of a brilliant writer at the forefront of a twenty-first-century war. Andrey Kurkov has been a consistent satirical commentator on his adopted country of Ukraine. His most recent work, Grey Bees, in which only two villagers remain in a village bombed to smithereens, is a dark foreshadowing of the devastation in the eastern part of Ukraine.

The author has lived in Kyiv and in the remote countryside of Ukraine throughout the Russian invasion. He has also been able to fly to European capitals, where he has worked to raise money for charities and addressed crowded halls. Fielding requests to write for every English newspaper and to be interviewed all over Europe, he has become an important voice for his people.

Kurkov sees every video and every posted message, and he spends the sleepless nights of continuous bombardment of his city delivering the truth about this invasion to the world.

Review Quotes

Praise for Grey Bees:

"A latter-day Bulgakov . . . A Ukrainian Murakami. --Phoebe Taplin, Guardian

"A post-Soviet Kafka." --Colin Freeman, Daily Telegraph

"Kurkov draws us with deceptive ease into a dense complex world full of wonderful characters." --Michael Palin

"Strange and mesmerising . . . In spare prose, Ukraine's most famous novelist unsparingly examines the inhuman confusions of our modern times and the longing of the warm-hearted everyman that is Sergeyich for the rationality of the natural world." --John Thornhill, Financial Times

"Sergey is at once a war-weary adventurer and a fairy-tale innocent . . . His naive gaze allows Kurkov to get to the heart of a country bewildered by crisis and war, but where kindness can still be found . . . Translated by Boris Dralyuk with sensitivity and ingenuity." --Uilleam Blacker, Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

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, his first in English translation, 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 novel Grey Bees was published in the United States by Deep Vellum in 2022, where it became a sensation for its honest and personal representation of life in Ukraine. He lives in Kyiv with his British wife and their three children.