»It is highly impressive how Andrej Kurkow manages to create a melancholic mood in his tale of the happiness seeker Sergej without descending into pathos.«

»Andrej Kurkow’s novel illustrates the life of a civil society that lives in a war without being at war themselves.«

»With Grey Bees, Andrej Kurkow has produced a sharply-drawn picture of the festering conflict in the Ukraine, one from which the rest of Europe has long since averted its gaze.«

»Kurkow tells Sergej’s story in a predominantly light and humorous tone, but frequently interweaves grotesque scenes of destruction.«

»At the same time poetic and poignant.«

»With the novel Grey Bees, the author Andrej Kurkow has once again achieved a resounding success.«

»Like Norbert Scheuer’s Winter Bees, this is far more than just another book about bees – and it is Kurkow’s strongest work yet.«

»Kurkow tells the oppressive story of the everyday of war in Eastern Ukraine with a quiet and poetic language.«

»This time, the Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin, known for his brilliantly dark humour, has written a modern-day odyssey, with a return that is ambiguously hopeful.«

»In spare prose, Ukraine's most famous novelist unsparingly examines the inhuman confusions of our modern times and the longing of the warm-hearted everyman that is Sergeyich for the rationality of the natural world.«

»Grey Bees is as timely as the author's Ukraine Diaries were in 2014, but treats the unfolding crisis in a more imaginative way, with a pinch of Kurkov's signature humour.«

»Kurkow distils a happy desperation, a form of surreal pantheism that places him geographically, like his country, between Russian romanticism and Scandinavian fatalism, between Chekhov and Paasilinna, Gogol and Hamsun.«

»In his book, the writer paints the ›grey zone‹ on the frontline with great humanity.«

»This book lingers in the details, and every detail bears significant power.«

»And this one is actually kind of a sweet simple story, but in a way that’s deceptively so. You watch someone’s sweetness be pushed to its limits.«

»May more novels follow.«

»Grey Bees is a gentle, sometimes ambivalent book about a conflict that had its share of moral complexity.«

»And this one is actually kind of a sweet simple story, but in a way that’s deceptively so. You watch someone’s sweetness be pushed to its limits.«

»The Ukrainian writer depicts with unsettling simplicity the day-to-day life of isolated pensioners in their deserted villages, in the heart of a ›grey zone‹ which divides the pro-Russian separatists from the rest of the Ukrainians on the front line.«

»The novel doesn’t provide an answer. But it reminds us not to forget the poetry, courage and imagination of a country that is much more than the battlefield it is today.«

»Somewhere between realism and dream, Andrei Kurkov has penned a great, absurd and philosophical novel about the chaos of the world, and about the brotherhood between a simple man and his bees.«

»The novel Grey Bees is essential reading in this time of war. Literature as an antidote to barbarism and hopelessness.«

»Somewhere between political fable and sparks of bucolic philosophy, this is a wonderful book that says so much about how high the stakes are where war is concerned.«

»Grey Bees makes the reader laugh, with tears in their eyes.«