Diary of an Invasion - by Andrey Kurkov (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the NBCC Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize for Grey Bees

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, novelist and journalist Andrey Kurkov was forced to flee his adopted hometown of Kyiv. This journal is a harrowing record of the months leading up to and after the invasion, as Kurkov migrates to the Ukrainian countryside for shelter. In small villages, surrounded by other refugees, he pens incisive dispatches on the latest border conflicts and bombardments affecting his loved ones. These wartime entries ruminate on Ukraine's historic past and possibilities for its future.

An avid political commentator, Kurkov has written for prominent English newspapers, delivered lectures, and been interviewed across Europe on the war in Ukraine. His most recent fictional work, The Silver Bone (2024), is a surrealist crime novel set in early 20th-century Kyiv, inspired by real-life police records Kurkov had access to.

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.