The events in the new novel by Andriy Kurkov and Yuriy Vynnychuk unfold in three plot sections: the Crusade of 1111, described in the Chronicle of the Knight Olgerd of Halych, the beginning of the Second World War in Lviv and Krakow, and the modern period. Who is the Virgin, and why has she been hunted for several centuries in a row, who is really the black archaeologist Oleg, and most...

Moscow, January 2013. Bunin, the Ukrainian President, has joined other heads of state in an open air swimming pool, to celebrate the Fourth Centenary of the Romanov Dynasty. Treading water, and drinking vodka with Putin, he's on top of his game and in fin

The protagonist of the novel 'Picnic on Ice' - journalist Viktor Zolotarev - receives an unusual task from a leading newspaper: to write obituaries about famous influential people who ... are still alive. Gradually, he realizes that he has become a partic

An intriguing title, a dynamic plot, vivid language...This book is about the life of a Ukrainian president, albeit one elected in 2011. The novel is as much political as it is a love story – it's about the private life of a man who had many things, but lacked happiness.

ItÆs the fall of 1977, and amid the lovely, leafy streets of Cambridge a young Harvard graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, longs more than anything to become an assimilated American and a professor of literature. He spends his days in a pleasant blur of seventeenth-century fiction, but when he meets a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver in a Harvard Square cafΘ, everything changes.

One of the most significant East German writers, Brigitte Reimann (1933-1973) wrote irreverent, autobiographical works that addressed issues and sensibilities otherwise repressed in the GDR. Outspoken and idealistic, she wrote in her diaries that she would rather 'live 30 wild years instead of 70 well-behaved ones.' Considered a master of socialist realism, she heeded the state's call for...

Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.

‘Count T. heads towards a mysterious area called ‘Optina Pustyn’. Bypassing all sorts of obstacles, he is steadily approaching the goal, however, seeing neither the meaning nor the reasons for his dangerous journey. However, soon he will have to doubt not only the illusory nature his mission, but also in his own reality, and at the same time in the reality of the entire surrounding world. Count...

Strange things are afoot in the cosmopolitan city of Lviv, western Ukraine. Seagulls are circling and the air smells salty, though Lviv is a long way from the sea.