Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv

Born near Leningrad in 1961, ANDREY KURKOV was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist. He received "hundreds of rejections" and was a pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than 75,000 copies of his books in a single year. His novel Death and the Penguin, his first in English translation, became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. As well as writing fiction for adults and children, he has become known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media. His work of reportage, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, was published in 2014, followed by the novel The Bickford Fuse (MacLehose Press, 2016). He lives in Kiev with his British wife and their three children.

"Ukraine's greatest living novelist" New European"A Ukrainian Murakami" GuardianA hugely entertaining romp through the beautiful city of Lviv, by the author of Death and the Penguin and Grey Bees, now reporting widely on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, his home country. 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 .

. . A ragtag group gathers round a mysterious grave in Lychakiv Cemetery - among them an ex-KGB officer and an ageing hippy he used to spy on.

Before long, Captain Ryabtsev and Alik Olisevych are teaming up to discover the source of the "anomalies". Meanwhile, Taras - who makes a living driving kidney-stone patients over cobblestones in his ancient Opel Vectra - is courting Darka, who works nights at a bureau de change despite being allergic to money. They young lovers don't know it, but their fate depends on two lonely old men, relics of another era, who will stop at nothing to save their city.

Shot through with Kurkov's unique brand of black humour and vodka-fuelled magic realism, Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv is an affectionate portrait one the world's most intriguing cities. Translated from the Russian by Reuben Woolley