Samson Kolechko has been assigned a most perplexing case – though it is mostly perplexing because it’s hard to understand why selling the meat of one’s own pig constitutes a crime.
But apparently it does, and at the insistence of the Chekist secret police officer assigned to “reinforce” the Lybid police station, Samson does his diligent – if diffident – best.
Yet no sooner has he got started than his live-in fiancée Nadezhda is abducted by striking railway workers who object to the census she’s carrying out. And when you factor in a mysterious thief in the police station itself, a deadly tram accident that may have been pre-meditated, and the potential reappearance of the culprit in the case of the silver bone, it’s no wonder the “meat case” takes a back seat.
But it is in the pursuit of that petty-fogging, seemingly mundane matter that Samson’s fate lies – and Nadezhda’s too, for the two are inextricably entwined.
Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk
Reviews for The Silver Bone – Longlisted for the International Booker Prize
“Andrey Kurkov is often called Ukraine’s greatest living writer, and it is a gift for crime fiction fans that he writes in this genre” New York Times
“Wildly enjoyable . . . A glorious aural portrait of a city in dangerous flux . . . I finished The Silver Bone wishing to read more” Guardian
But apparently it does, and at the insistence of the Chekist secret police officer assigned to “reinforce” the Lybid police station, Samson does his diligent – if diffident – best.
Yet no sooner has he got started than his live-in fiancée Nadezhda is abducted by striking railway workers who object to the census she’s carrying out. And when you factor in a mysterious thief in the police station itself, a deadly tram accident that may have been pre-meditated, and the potential reappearance of the culprit in the case of the silver bone, it’s no wonder the “meat case” takes a back seat.
But it is in the pursuit of that petty-fogging, seemingly mundane matter that Samson’s fate lies – and Nadezhda’s too, for the two are inextricably entwined.
Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk
Reviews for The Silver Bone – Longlisted for the International Booker Prize
“Andrey Kurkov is often called Ukraine’s greatest living writer, and it is a gift for crime fiction fans that he writes in this genre” New York Times
“Wildly enjoyable . . . A glorious aural portrait of a city in dangerous flux . . . I finished The Silver Bone wishing to read more” Guardian