Penguin Lost

Penguin Lost is the sequel to Death and the Penguin and third of Andrey Kurkov's translated works following The Case of the General's Thumb.

We rejoin Viktor, who has returned from the Antarctic where he fled in place of Misha the penguin at the end of the first novel. Things have changed, and he starts work for one of the new breed of politicians facing an upcoming election. But Misha's gone, and he has to track the Penguin down. The wild goose chase takes Viktor from Kiev to Moscow and then to deepest darkest Chechnya.

As ever, the world is both real and surreal. Choices are simply made, and although all manner of things happen to those around him, our hero is blessed with a certain amount of luck to avoid the pitfalls that await at every turn. So there are glamorous, and not-so-glamorous women, and strange men who drive 4x4s around the former Soviet Union.

A Matter of Life and Death is the next Kurkov book up, having just been published in hardback.