Thirteen years ago, Andrey Kurkov strolled along Andriyivsky Uzviz, Kiev's main tourist drag, wearing a large sign that proclaimed: I am the author. The first person to pay him attention was a local racketeer, supervising his turf. But after Kurkov explained that he was only trying to sell books he had written, the Ukrainian gangster was so impressed that he granted the ethnic Russian author free protection. A grateful Kurkov wanted to present him with a signed copy of his book, but the friendly racketeer waved him off: "I'm not a reader."

Plenty of other people, however, are hooked on Kurkov's prose. Today, the 45-year-old Kiev resident is one of the world's best-selling contemporary authors in Russian. He has penned 18 novels — mostly detective stories or thrillers — some 20 screenplays and five books for children. Four million copies

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) of his books have been published in 32 languages, and the English-language omnibus edition of his novels Death and the Penguin and Penguin Lost will be published in July by Random House. (Death and the Penguin has already been included in France's school curriculum.) With their fluid mix of the real and absurd, Kurkov's books capture the topsy-turvy nature of life in post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia. "When I write, I enjoy distorting reality," says Kurkov, who now works in a high-ceilinged studio near the street where he once sought customers with his homemade sign.

The comfort of his spacious new digs isn't lost on a man who once had to buy six tons of paper in Kazakhstan and have it delivered to Kiev in order to print 75,000 copies of his first two books. Kurkov's foray into the paper trade put him $16,000 in the red. To avoid any chance of meeting Kalashnikov-toting debt collectors, he struck an innovative deal with a newspaper kiosk chain to sell his books alongside the daily press. Kurkov was also the first person in Kiev to put ads for his product on the sides of municipal streetcars and buses. Once, to save a load of his books from being discarded at an Odessa store, he paid $15 to spend the night with the consignment in a hearse, making sure to clear out before the driver headed off for an early-morning funeral. Finally, after 14 months, Kurkov paid back his debt.

His first best seller, Death and the Penguin, chronicles the unlikely pairing of Viktor, a failed writer in his late 30s, and Misha, a penguin who moves in with him after the city zoo goes broke. Both lonely and depressive, man and bird take a liking to each other. Suddenly, a major newspaper offers Viktor a job writing advance obituaries on prominent people, who quickly drop dead of the very causes Viktor has imaginatively described in his articles. Meanwhile, Misha's naturally tuxedoed presence becomes de rigueur at funerals — and Viktor makes good money renting out his pet penguin for the memorial services of his obit subjects. As the death toll mounts, Viktor realizes he is an unwilling participant in either a major gang war or secret state-security purges — or, more likely, both. Although he learns to accept this morbid situation, Viktor wants a better life for Misha and secretly arranges to send him home to the Antarctic. But when Viktor accidentally learns that his own obituary has been commissioned, he takes the flight to the Antarctic instead.

In Penguin Lost, Viktor returns home when the heat is off and gets involved in high-level Kiev politics. He learns that his penguin has ended up in Chechnya, and heads to the volatile region to save his feathered friend. There, he ends up slaving for a Chechen boss in a makeshift crematorium that is the region's only neutral zone because it accommodates the dead from both sides of the conflict. Although he eventually returns home with Misha, Viktor and the penguin soon have to flee from a Kiev mafia boss turned parliamentarian. Their escape route involves a yacht trip to Argentina with a Bosnian-Serb family wanted as war criminals. Luckily for Misha, Argentina boasts islands inhabited by birds of his breed. After stints in Ukraine and Chechnya, what more could a tuckered-out penguin ask for?

Flightless birds aren't the only characters in Kurkov's absurdly realistic landscape. In his 2004 novel, The President's Last Love, Russian President Vladimir Putin duly steps down when his second term expires in 2008, but makes a comeback in 2012. (The scenario isn't so far-fetched: late last month, Russian State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov suggested it would be constitutionally acceptable for Putin to return to office then.)

The novel follows Putin as he presides over a gala honoring the 400th anniversary of the Romanov imperial dynasty, after which, naturally, the Russian Orthodox Church canonizes Lenin as "the guardian of the poor and the weak." Reality is also given an alternate course in Kurkov's 2000 satire of the modern-day Ukrainian Security Service, The Kind Angel of Death, in which a colonel complains that a lack of funding is forcing the former kgb to "use the passive help of our citizens ... Unfortunately, none of these assistants of ours ever managed to assist us without our help." Kurkov captures such absurdities of post-Soviet existence with characteristic black humor.

Born in St. Petersburg, Kurkov grew up in Kiev, where his parents moved when he was 2. He learned Ukrainian, majored in foreign languages at college, and now writes essays in Russian, Ukrainian, English and German. He also speaks Japanese, his fluency in which nearly landed him a stint monitoring Japanese radio traffic for the kgb in 1985. To avoid that, he worked as a prison guard in Odessa, where his job was to write papers for political indoctrination classes. That took about 30 minutes a day. For the rest of his remaining 18 months at the prison, Kurkov penned children's books.

Writerly recognition took many years. Beginning in 1980, he mailed out 1,000 manuscripts, only to collect 500 refusals. "The rest got lost in the mail," he says. However, persistence paid off. In 1988, the London-based writers' association International pen accepted Kurkov as a member on the strength of his unpublished manuscripts. Then, in 1999, Death and the Penguin was picked up by a Swiss publisher, and began its slow climb onto best-seller lists in Switzerland and Britain.

At first, some Ukrainians refused to consider Kurkov a Ukrainian writer because he wrote in Russian. At the same time, his criticism of Putin infuriated Russian nationalists. It was only last year that a St. Petersburg-based firm cautiously resumed publishing Kurkov's work. "Since neither Ukrainian nor Russian literature would claim me, I had to reconcile myself to being merely a part of world literature," Kurkov says now, safe in the knowledge that his adopted nation has finally accepted him. "Much as I reject ethnic nationalism, I'm all for a civic one," he says. Ukraine's various ethnicities can keep their country bound together, he believes, if they stick to their country's reputation for good-natured behavior. "A drinking bout in a Russian village ends in a bloody fistfight," Kurkov says. "In a Ukrainian one, it ends in loud singing together."

• YURI ZARAKHOVICH / Kiev
• Andrey Kurkov captures topsy-turvy post-Soviet life