President's Last Love

A major new novel from the author of Death and the Penguin. Moscow, January 2013. Bunin, the Ukrainian President, has joined other heads of state in an open air swimming pool, to celebrate the Fourth Centenary of the Romanov Dynasty. Treading water, and drinking vodka with Putin, he's on top of his game and in fine health. Yet two years later Bunin undergoes a heart transplant, with very serious repercussions... Rewind to the early '90s; the Soviet Union has crumbled and in the midst of a new independent Ukraine struggling to find its feet, a young Sergey Pavlovich Bunin is on the make. Casting aside a career as a catering manager he enters the political fray and begins the long and precarious journey to the top, at the same time looking after his impoverished mother and enfeebled brother. Spanning forty years, The President's Last Love is Kurkov's most ambitious work to date, and delivers an intricately woven and often hilarious political satire on life before and after the Iron Curtain. A colossus of a novel concerning love, power, corruption, lies and potatoes.