President'S Last Love, The

Description: 'A bittersweet work, tough and touching at the same time. Kurkov's style is spare and effective, drawing us with deceptive ease into a dense, complex world full of wonderful characters' Michael Palin A sharp, engaging satire that delves into Ukraine's history. Moscow, 2013. Bunin, the Ukrainian President, has joined other heads of state in an open air swimming pool to drink vodka and celebrate with Putin. During his rise to power Bunin has juggled with formidable and eccentric political and personal challenges. His troubles with his family and his women combine with his difficulties with corrupt businessmen and demanding international allies, but it is his recent heart transplant that worries him most. Since the operation he has started to develop freckles, and his heart donor's mysterious widow seems to have moved in with him... Spanning forty years, The President's Last Love is a hilarious satire on love, lies and life before and after the Iron Curtain. Review: A bittersweet work, tough and touching at the same time. Kurkov's style is spare and effective, drawing us with deceptive ease into a dense, complex world full of wonderful characters -- Michael Palin Inventive, funny and worryingly prophetic -- Tibor Fischer * Guardian * Kurkov is a fine satirist and a real, blackly comic find * Observer * Kurkov sports a double whammy: the fiercest of political intelligences married to a truly surrealistic mindset ... This is an ambitious, multi-layered political black comedy * Independent * Kurkov's eye for the absurdities of Ukrainian life is as sharp as ever * Sunday Telegraph * Author Biography: Andrey Kurkov 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 film cameraman, writer of screenplays and author of critically acclaimed and popular novels.