‘Original and intriguing. Relocates the historical crime novel somewhere between Kafka and The Twilight Zone.’
– Frank Tallis

Suffused with strangeness and absurdity, Andrey Kurkov’s latest, longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize, is the first in a series of historical crime novels set in Kyiv that take on a particular resonance in light of Ukraine’s recent history.

A bone of pure silver. A suit of fine English cloth. A city in limbo. Welcome to the strange and mysterious world of The Silver Bone. After a violent chance encounter, Samson Kolechko is forced to put his engineering career on hold. But as his life becomes completely derailed, he finds himself unwittingly recruited as an investigator for the city’s new police force.

Set against the backdrop of Kyiv in 1919, The Silver Bone is equal parts classic whodunit and rich historical fiction; in fact, the inspiration for the novel came from a large cache of Bolshevik secret police files from the post-first world war period gifted to the writer by one of his readers. The bizarre and restrictive laws of the time – citizens had a right to have cattle, but had no right to sell meat or leather – are reflected in the surreal, off-kilter version of reality in which Samson exists.

In this unmissable conversation for history and crime lovers alike, Kurkov will discuss the strange and true stories that inspired the book, the parallels between Ukraine then and now, and the experience of fiction as an escape from reality.

Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist. He 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 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.