Grey Bees: A captivating, heartwarming story about a gentle beekeeper caught up in the war in Ukraine - Softcover

Kurkov, Andrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0857059351 ISBN 13: 9780857059352

Publisher: MacLehose Press, 2021

Synopsis

Ukraine's most famous novelist dramatises the conflict raging in his country through the adventures of a mild-mannered beekeeper.

"A warm and surprisingly funny book from Ukraine's greatest living novelist" Charlie Connelly, New European Books of the Year

Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine's Grey Zone, the no-man's-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the war, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, his "frenemy" from his schooldays.

With little food and no electricity, under ever-present threat of bombardment, Sergeyich's one remaining pleasure is his bees. As spring approaches, he knows he must take them far from the Grey Zone so they can collect their pollen in peace.

This simple mission on their behalf introduces him to combatants and civilians on both sides of the battle lines: loyalists, separatists, Russian occupiers and Crimean Tatars. Wherever he goes, Sergeyich's childlike simplicity and strong moral compass disarm everyone he meets.

But could these qualities be manipulated to serve an unworthy cause, spelling disaster for him, his bees and his country?

Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk

About this title

About the Authors

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 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 followed by the novels The Bickford Fuse, Grey Bees, and Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv (longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023), as well as his non-fiction work Diary of an Invasion (2022).

BORIS DRALYUK is an award-winning translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He taught Russian literature for a number of years at UCLA and at the University of St Andrews. He is a co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, and has translated Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, as well as Kurkov's The Bickford Fuse. In 2020 he received the inaugural Kukula Award for Excellence in Non-fiction Book Reviewing from the Washington Monthly.

From the Back Cover

Ukraine's most famous novelist dramatises the conflict raging in his country through the adventures of a mild-mannered beekeeper.

Edition details

• Publisher: MacLehose Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0857059351
• ISBN 13: 9780857059352
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352