Press

What the critics say

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

There is much to enjoy in this book. Kurkov works in the tradition of Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov, blending folkloric characters, magical realism and political satire to reveal a society riddled with greed, stupidity and corruption
- Financial Times

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

Kurkov is hugely talented
- Time Out

This book is a joyride... Kurkov has a rollercoaster of fun between zig and zag. He defies the reader not to join him
- Scotsman

Set in post-Orange Revolution Kiev, Kurkov's narrative is a meditation on the uneasy dreams of a troubled cultural psyche
- Times Literary Supplement

Blackly surreal... Kurkov has an artisan's eye for quirky detail but dispatches it with terse Eastern pessimism. Here, he weaves a low-key epic in which a series of characters - a single mother, a sniffer-dog handler, a security guard, a politician, a man having an affair in his sleep, a widow, two cats and a plastinated corpse - become embroiled in a bizarre conspiracy involving a drug that sharpens people's sense of justice and a very dodgy milking operation. It sounds fanciful but Kurkov never gets too caught up in this world, describing it with a pragmatic economy and powerful clarity
- Metro

Kurkov's imagination kicks into high gear and turns Kiev into an absurdist playground. The result is a whimsical, skewed vision which can be, by turns, delightful and discomforting
- Herald

Kurkov entices us along all the fault-lines of his bizarre world, where a young man sleepwalks through a double life and a widow notices her embalmed husband has fresh dirt on his unworn shoes
- Independent

Drugs, milk and a brace of cats pop up in a murky epic from Ukraine's master of the surreal conspiracy thriller
- Metro

The separate storylines... twine into a bizarre quasi-murder mystery, featuring anti-fear medicine, human milk used as youth serum, corpse embalming, a cat that comes back from the dead and shady government practices. Ukranian author Andrey Kurkov's direct, unfussy narration is drenched in post-soviet pessimism and alcohol... readers trying to second-guess future twists will be astonished
- Manchester Evening News