The Milkman in the Night

The Milkman in the Night

Summary

'Good-hearted and brutal at the same time, The Milkman in the Night is a complex, unsettling mixture of bleakness and warmth' Sunday Times

Read this eccentric epic from the author of cult classic Death and the Penguin


Semyon is disturbed. He has woken up in the living room with blood on his shirt, an angry wife and no idea where he was the night before. When this happens several mornings in a row, he realises he needs to investigate.

After his friend Volodka follows him one night, they discover he's meeting a tall, blonde woman and accompanying her to her apartment. In the daytime he doesn't know this woman or where her apartment is and, odder yet, someone is watching Volodka watching Semyon.

Meanwhile, there are some strange goings-on in Kyiv - an unemployed sniffer-dog handler makes a dangerous discovery, a single mother is providing breast milk for an unusual recipient and a vengeful cat is on the loose...

Reviews

  • A glorious, epic, eccentric and often hilarious satire, heavily tinged with Russian melancholy
    Kate Saunders, The Times

About the author

Andrey Kurkov

Andrey Kurkov is a writer, journalist, and the current president of PEN Ukraine. He was born in St Petersburg in 1961. Having graduated from the Kiev Foreign Languages Institute, he worked for some time as a journalist, did his military service as a prison warder in Odessa, then became a writer of screenplays and author of critically acclaimed and popular novels, including the bestselling Death and the Penguin. Kurkov has long been a respected commentator on Ukraine for the world's media, notably in the U.K., France, Germany, and the United States.
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