The Milkman in the Night

Drugs, milk and a brace of cats pop up in a murky epic from Ukraine's master of the surreal conspiracy thriller

Metro

There is much to enjoy in this book. Kurkov works in the tradition of Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov, blending folkloric characters, magical realism and political satire to reveal a society riddled with greed, stupidity and corruption

Marina Lewycka, Financial Times

Set in post-Orange Revolution Kiev, Kurkov's narrative is a meditation on the uneasy dreams of a troubled cultural psyche

Times Literary Supplement

Good-hearted and brutal at the same time, The Milkman in the Night is a complex, unsettling mixture of bleakness and warmth

Sunday Times

This book is a joyride... Kurkov has a rollercoaster of fun between zig and zag. He defies the reader not to join him

Scotsman

Kurkov's imagination kicks into high gear and turns Kiev into an absurdist playground. The result is a whimsical, skewed vision which can be, by turns, delightful and discomforting

Herald

Kurkov entices us along all the fault-lines of his bizarre world, where a young man sleepwalks through a double life and a widow notices her embalmed husband has fresh dirt on his unworn shoes

Jane Jakeman, Independent

The separate storylines... twine into a bizarre quasi-murder mystery, featuring anti-fear medicine, human milk used as youth serum, corpse embalming, a cat that comes back from the dead and shady government practices. Ukranian author Andrey Kurkov's direct, unfussy narration is drenched in post-soviet pessimism and alcohol... readers trying to second-guess future twists will be astonished

Manchester Evening News

Kurkov is hugely talented

Time Out

A glorious, epic, eccentric and often hilarious satire, heavily tinged with Russian melancholy

Kate Saunders, The Times

Blackly surreal... Kurkov has an artisan's eye for quirky detail but dispatches it with terse Eastern pessimism. Here, he weaves a low-key epic in which a series of characters - a single mother, a sniffer-dog handler, a security guard, a politician, a man having an affair in his sleep, a widow, two cats and a plastinated corpse - become embroiled in a bizarre conspiracy involving a drug that sharpens people's sense of justice and a very dodgy milking operation. It sounds fanciful but Kurkov never gets too caught up in this world, describing it with a pragmatic economy and powerful clarity

Andrzej Lukowski, Metro