HarperVia, a division of HarperCollins — one of the world’s leading publishing houses specialising in translated literature — is bringing Andriy Kurkov’s novel The Lost Soldiers to an American audience. The author completed the book in 2024. The story is set in Kyiv in 1919 and follows the investigation into the mysterious disappearance of hundreds of Red Army soldiers from a local bathhouse.
The American press has described the book as Kurkov’s return to fiction, after he became widely known abroad as a commentator on the Russian-Ukrainian war. In a comment to Publishers Weekly, the writer noted that during the full-scale invasion he had become more of a journalist and essayist, making it difficult to return to writing fiction.
The Bathhouse Affair is the third instalment in a series of books centred on mystical cases in Kyiv and the detective Samson Kolechko. As with the previous novels in the series, the book has been translated into English by Borys Dralyuk.