Andrey Kurkov for The Lost Soldiers

Literary legend Andrey Kurkov joins us in Edinburgh for the first time to celebrate the latest in his Kyiv mysteries, _Lost Soldiers._ It is an honour to welcome him this April.

We can't wait to see you there._Fresh from case of the stolen heart, one that shattered his belief in the regime he works for, Samson Kolechko is confronted with a mystery that borders on the impossible.

How could a squad of Red Army soldiers have disappeared from the Galician bathhouse, leaving only their boots and their uniforms as evidence they ever existed?__Faced with such a fantastical conundrum, Samson resorts to fantastical investigation method: stitching his operative severed ear into a bathhouse worker's jacket, he is able to eavesdrop on his every move.

But he discovers far more than he bargained for, uncovering human remains in the stoves and the presence of a sinister religious cult in the city.__With his quick-witted new wife Nadezhda at his side, Samson must not only solve the case but navigate the political turmoil that still grips Kyiv as civil war looms and trust between neighbours and comrades is eroded day by day.__In this third volume, Andrey Kurkov, Ukraine's greatest living novelist, and a true master of absurd storytelling, vividly depicts a city filled with political turbulence and eccentric characters - and draws playful parallels with the present day._Born near Leningrad in 1961, Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist.

He received "hundreds of rejections" and was a pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than 75,000 copies of his books in a single year.

His novel Death and the Penguin became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages.

As well as writing fiction for adults and children, he has become known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media.

His work of reportage, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev was followed by the novels The Bickford Fuse, Grey Bees, and Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv (longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023), as well as his non-fiction work Diary of an Invasion (2022)._See here for venue accessibility_ [https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/accessibility/edinburgh-pilrig-event-accessibility/]