The Book Club was launched with Lars Mytting’s The Sixteen Trees of the Somme, for which the author joined us by Zoom from Norway. Since then, the club has discussed a novel each month, often with the author or translator, so we are delighted to welcome Andrey Kurkov, author of the best-selling Death and the Penguin, to discuss his novel, Grey Bees.

In the no-man’s-land between loyalist and separatist forces, lies the Ukrainian village of Little Starhorodivka. Thanks to the sporadic violence and constant propaganda of the on-off war only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and his school-days ‘frenemy’, Pashka. But now that winter’s over, how is Sergey going to get his bees through the battle lines to feast on the pollen beyond?

For more about the book club and for transcriptions of its discussions with authors, translators, editors and critics go to: www.litfest.org

Andrey Kurkov is a Ukrainian author who writes in Russian. Before the success of Death and the Penguin (2001), he was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer and in his spare time self-published his fiction. Since then he has also become well known as a commentator on Ukraine for the international media. His many books include The Ukraine Diaries (2014) and The Bickford Fuse (2016).

International Fiction Book Club: Andrey Kurkov - Grey Bees