Death and the Penguin review

This lovely little book, by Andrey Kurkov, tells the story of a writer and his pet penguin.  Victor is hired to write obituaries and becomes suspicious when the people he writes about start dying.  It's a Kafkaesque piece, in that Victor keeps having conversations where people talk around the subject without every actually telling him anything, and nothing is really explained in the end.  The ending itself is rather abrupt, which is a shame since the rest of the book is so delightful.

Misha the penguin makes for a great secondary character, but my favourite thing about the book is that there is another, human, character also called Misha - and he is only ever referred to in the text as "Misha-non-penguin".

Highly entertaining, despite a rather jarring conclusion.