The Silver Bone: A Novel

by Andrey Kurkov

Overview

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2024

"Very intriguing and atmospheric ... a fascinating read in the light of contemporary events.” –Alexander McCall Smith, Bestselling Author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

"With its earthy prose and stunning attention to detail, this stands apart." –Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From Ukraine’s most celebrated novelist, "a gift for crime fiction fans" (New York Times Book Review) that introduces rookie detective Samson Kolechko in Kyiv as he tackles his first case, set against real life details of the tumultuous early twentieth century.

Kyiv, 1919. World War I has ended in Western Europe, but to the East, six factions continue to vie for control of Ukraine. Amidst the political turmoil, young Samson Kolechko is forced to place his engineering career on hold. But in the city of Kyiv everything remains up for grabs and new opportunity lurks just around the corner . . .

When two Red Army soldiers commandeer his home, Samson’s life is completely upended. But as Samson juggles his personal life –including a budding romance with the ingenious Nadezhda, a statistician helping run the city’s census– with the soldiers’ intrusion, he winds up overhearing their secret plans. Deciding to report them, Samson instead finds himself unwittingly recruited as an investigator for the city’s new police force.

His first case involves two murders, a long bone made of pure silver, and a suit of decidedly unusual proportions tailored from fine English cloth. The odds stacked against him, Samson turns to Nadezhda, who proves to be more than his match. Inflected with Kurkov’s signature humor and off kilter universe, The Silver Bone takes its inspiration from the archives of Kyiv's secret police, crafting a propulsive narrative bursting to life with rich historical detail.

Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063352292
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/11/2025
Series:	The Kyiv Mysteries , #1
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ukraine's most celebrated novelist, Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay writer before becoming a novelist. His books include the 2024 International Booker Prize-longlisted The Silver Bone, the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Grey Bees, and the international bestseller Death and the Penguin. He is also a commentator and journalist reporting on Ukraine for the international media. He lives with his family in Kyiv.

Editorial Reviews

"Often called Ukraine's greatest living writer ... it is a gift for crime fiction fans that [Kurkov] writes in this genre." — New York Times Book Review

"A gripping whodunnit with surrealist flourishes . . . Kurkov brings to life an overlooked and much-contested episode in Ukrainian history, capturing the brutality with which Soviet forces first attempted to establish control over the city." — Washington Post

“A very intriguing and atmospheric novel by a highly accomplished writer. ... [The Silver Bone] is a fascinating read in the light of contemporary events.” — Alexander McCall Smith, Bestselling Author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

"A glorious aural portrait of a city in dangerous flux ... The novel may be playful, but it poses fundamental questions at a time when bloody conflict has engulfed Europe again.. . . I finished The Silver Bone wishing to read more." — The Guardian

"[The Silver Bone is a] fascinating series launch . . . the finely drawn characters and harrowing descriptions of daily life in 1919 Kyiv leave a far more lasting impression than clever genre tricks ever could. With its earthy prose and stunning attention to detail, this stands apart." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Rich and compulsive, a modern classic in the making.” — Anna Bailey, author of Where the Truth Lies

“[A] wonderfully gritty whodunnit” — Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet 

Translated from the Russian by poet Boris Dralyuk, Kurkov’s prose is brisk but capacious, with a quiet flair. The innumerable annoyances and small indignities of living through conflict (persistent lice, gelatinous porridge, insufficient kindling, erratic power outages) are presented in all their grating detail. And though it is clear-eyed in its depiction of war’s sheer senselessness, The Silver Bone has an unusual poetic lightness too. — Financial Times

"Mix[ing] elements of grim humor and surrealism . . . [The Silver Bone is] a winning offbeat crime novel that begs for a sequel." — Library Journal

“If Chandler thought that danger and corruption were endemic to the Los Angeles roamed by his detective Philip Marlowe, he should have taken a look at Kyiv. . . . One hopes and prays that Ukraine still has enough Samson and Nadezhdas—and Andrey Kurkovs—to escape soon from its long, ongoing collective misfortune.” — The Bulwark

"Original and intriguing. Relocates the historical crime novel somewhere between Kafka and The Twilight Zone." — Frank Tallis, Author of Death in Vienna and Vienna Blood

"In the tradition of Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther . . . Kurkov sets crime-solving against the chaos of a turbulent era — for his Samson Kolechko, the upheaval of Ukraine in 1919, when Cossacks, the Red Army and their White opponents, and even Chinese Communists battled in streets of a Kiev darkened by power failure ... [The Silver Bone] poses haunting moral questions about defending order in perilous days, questions that reverberate a century later in Ukraine and around the world." — David O. Stewart, Award-winning historian and author of The Lincoln Deception

"An atmospheric police procedural whose protagonist battles personal tragedy and a tangled system to solve his first case." — Kirkus Reviews

"Kurkov melds history with elements of magical realism and offsets the grim atmosphere with random bouts of humor." — Booklist

From the Publisher

2023-12-06
Murder in Kyiv in the Bolshevik Revolution’s aftermath.

In the first of a projected series, the prominent Ukrainian novelist Kurkov introduces Samson Kolechko, an unemployed electrical engineer who lands a detective job in 1919, launching him into the investigation of a theft that evolves into the pursuit of a murderer that almost claims his life. After his father is slaughtered in the street by Cossack marauders and his own right ear is severed in the attack, Samson finds himself isolated in his Kyiv flat until some of his space is appropriated by two Red Army soldiers. When he reports their theft of his father’s beloved desk to the local police station, he’s improbably offered a job as a detective to help stem the tide of property crimes in a city that’s roiled by violence in the unsettled aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. With relative swiftness but no small amount of personal peril, Samson follows a trail that eventually leads to the discovery of a theft of silver objects, including the eponymous body part, after he survives an ambush and is nearly murdered alongside a soldier who’d been assisting him and a witness in the case. He’s aided in his pursuit of their killer by his friendship with Nadezhda, a young woman who works in Kyiv’s census office and has become the object of Samson’s romantic interest. Kurkov deepens his story with a vivid portrait of Kyiv that emphasizes the city’s “atmosphere of fear and danger” and considerable material deprivation in the wake of Russia’s epochal political change. Samson and his colleagues must function in what amounts to a barter economy that involves frequent nighttime blackouts caused by the theft of the firewood fueling Kyiv’s power plant, along with food and water shortages. It’s a bleak, but fitting, backdrop to one man’s grimly determined quest for justice.

An atmospheric police procedural whose protagonist battles personal tragedy and a tangled system to solve his first case.

Kirkus Reviews