The Milkman in the Night

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

Laurence Scott, Times Literary Supplement

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

Kate Saunders, The Times

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

Metro

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... The novel's imperfect dopplegangers and off-key repetitions warm the shiver of the traditional uncanny, and in doing so replicate the dreamer's affable toleration of obvious frauds... What lingers in Kurkov's depiction of a Kiev both somnolent and necropolitan, is the notion that Ukraine's recent past has been blighted by toxic wastefulness, the bad vigilance of espionage and surveillance.

Times Literary Supplement

This book is a joyride in which the joyless mix with the fearful, the crazy, the paranoid, not to mention some innocent jetsam... 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

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