The Penguin Books in Order

The Penguin series is where many readers first meet Andrey Kurkov’s strange, funny, mournful version of post-Soviet Kyiv. It begins with Death and the Penguin, a short novel with a very simple hook: Viktor Zolotaryov is a struggling writer who lives alone with Misha, a king penguin he adopted after the local zoo could no longer feed all its animals.

That setup sounds whimsical. It isn’t, not exactly.

Viktor gets hired by a newspaper to write “living obituaries” for public figures who are still alive. The work pays better than his fiction ever has, and at first it looks like a lucky break. Then the people he writes about start dying, and Viktor realizes that his neat little job may be part of something much colder and more dangerous.

Misha the penguin gives the books their odd center of gravity. He is comic because he is a penguin in a Kyiv apartment, taking baths in cold water and waddling through a world of gangsters, funerals, editors, and officials. But he is also sad, displaced, and silent. He mirrors Viktor’s own loneliness, and his presence makes the city around him seem even more out of joint.

Penguin Lost follows Viktor after the events of the first book, when his flight from danger leaves unfinished business behind. He returns to a Ukraine where protection, elections, money, and crime are tangled together, and where Misha’s fate has become part of another chain of bargains. The search for the penguin becomes a search for safety, loyalty, and some kind of moral footing in a world that keeps moving the ground under Viktor’s feet.

The tone is deadpan rather than frantic. Kurkov lets the absurdity sit quietly on the page: a pet penguin at a mafia funeral, an obituary that works like a death sentence, a man who wants to stay invisible but keeps being pulled into other people’s schemes. The books are crime stories, political satire, and lonely domestic comedy all at once.

Read them in order. Death and the Penguin sets up Viktor, Misha, and the emotional logic of the series, while Penguin Lost depends on that bond and on the first book’s aftermath. Together they make a compact, offbeat portrait of a society trying to improvise new rules after the old ones have collapsed.