22/07/14 Meeting

Wild Ink

Richard Smyth

Another good turnout this month, meeting only slightly marred by the fact that some idiot forgot to book the room. Luckily the weather was still very warm so we sat outside.

The book didn't fare too well. The major observations being that it was very hard to empathise with any of the characters, and very little seemed to happen!

Scores ranged from 2.5 up to 5 with an average of 3.9. Our lowest score yet.

The pitches for this month were as follows

• Jon - I Robot by Isaac Asimov
• Helen - All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West

 The winning pitch was from Ivan with The Gardener from Ochakov by Andrey Kurkov.

Here`s a synopsis from Goodreads:

Igor walks along in the old Soviet policeman's uniform, confident that he'll have the best costume at the party. But Igor hasn't gone far before he realises something is wrong. The streets are unusually dark and empty, and the only person to emerge from the shadows runs away from him in terror.


After a perplexing conversation with the terrified man, who turns out to be a wine smuggler, and on recovering from the resulting hangover, Igor comes to an unbelievable conclusion: he has found his way back to 1957. And it isn't the innocent era his mother and her friends have so sentimentally described.

Heres a bit of info about the author stolen from various places.

Andrey Kurkov was born in St Petersburg in 1961. Having graduated from the Kiev Foreign Languages Institute, he worked for some time as a journalist, did his military service as a prison warder in Odessa, then became a writer of screenplays and author of critically acclaimed and popular novels, including the bestselling Death and the Penguin. Kurkov has long been a respected commentator on Ukraine for the world’s media, notably in the UK, France, Germany and the States.

Kurkov's father was a test pilot and his mother was a doctor. He started writing at the age of seven when after the death of two of his three pet hamsters, he wrote a poem about the loneliness of the remaining pet. He also produced poetry about Lenin, purportedly inspired by his Soviet education at the time.

As a trained Japanese translator Kurkov was assigned military service assisting the KGB.However, he managed to get his papers changed to service with the military police. This offered him a greater degree of freedom during and after his service period. He was assigned a prison guard position in Odessa. It was during this period that Kurkov wrote all of his children's stories.

Kurkov's first novel was published two weeks before the fall of the Soviet Union, and in the ensuing social and political turmoil he made the first steps towards self-publishing and distribution. Borrowing money from friends to fund his work he managed to publish independently.While organising distribution around Ukraine, he would also sell copies by hand from stalls on busy streets.

Like many successful writers, Kurkov had difficulty getting his first publishing contract. He reportedly received 500 rejections before being accepted, in which time he had written almost eight complete novels.

Later in his career he won acclaim as one of the most successful Ukrainian authors in the post-Soviet era and featuring on European bestseller lists.

The next meeting will be on 26th of August.

See you there!

ps. If anyone would like me to order from Quinns please let me know asap