
Igor walks along in the old Soviet policeman's uniform, confident that he'll have the best costume at the party. But Igor hasn't gone far before he realises something is wrong. The streets are unusually dark and empty, and the only person to emerge from the shadows runs away from him in terror. After a perplexing conversation with the terrified man, who turns out to be a wine smuggler, and on recovering from the resulting hangover, Igor comes to an unbelievable conclusion: he has found his way back to 1957. And it isn't the innocent era his mother and her friends have so sentimentally described. As he travels between centuries, his life becomes more and more complicated. The unusual gardener who lives in his mother's shed keeps disappearing, his best friend has blackmailed the wrong people, and Igor has fallen in love with a married woman in a time before he was born. With his mother's disapproval at his absences growing, and his adventures in each time frame starting to catch up with him, Igor has to survive the past if he wants any kind of future.
Author

Andrei Kurkov is a Russian and Ukrainian writer who writes in Russian (fiction) and Ukrainian (non-fiction) languages. Kurkov was born in small town of Budogoszcz, Russia on April 23, 1961. When Kurkov was young, his family moved to Kyiv, Ukraine. In 1983 Kurkov graduated Kyiv Pedagogical Academy of Foreign Languages and later also completed a Japanese translation training. Among Kurkov's most famous Russian novels are 'Smert postoronnego' (1996, translated into English in 2001 under the title 'Death and the Penguin') and 'Zakon ulitki' (2002, translated into English in 2005 under the title 'Penguin lost)'. Kurkov's only Ukrainian non-fiction book is 'Ruh "Emanus": istoriya solidarnosti' (2017).