Grey Bees cover art

Grey Bees

A captivating, heartwarming story about a gentle beekeeper caught up in the war in Ukraine

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Try for £0.00
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Grey Bees

By: Andrey Kurkov, Boris Dralyuk - translator
Narrated by: Andrew Byron
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £17.99

Buy Now for £17.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Ukraine's most famous novelist dramatises the conflict raging in his country through the adventures of a mild-mannered beekeeper. From the author of the bestselling Death and the Penguin.

Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine's Grey Zone, the no-man's-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda that has been dragging on for years, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, a 'frenemy' from his schooldays.

With little food and no electricity, under ever-present threat of bombardment, Sergeyich's one remaining pleasure is his bees. As spring approaches, he knows he must take them far from the Grey Zone so they can collect their pollen in peace. This simple mission on their behalf introduces him to combatants and civilians on both sides of the battle lines: loyalists, separatists, Russian occupiers and Crimean Tatars. Wherever he goes, Sergeyich's childlike simplicity and strong moral compass disarm everyone he meets.

But could these qualities be manipulated to serve an unworthy cause, spelling disaster for him, his bees and his country?

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. Who better than Ukraine's most famous novelist—who writes in Russian—to illuminate and present a balanced portrait of this most bewildering of modern conflicts?

Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk.

Boris Dralyuk is an award-winning translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He taught Russian literature for a number of years at UCLA and at the University of St Andrews. He is a co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, and has translated Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, as well as Kurkov's The Bickford Fuse. In 2020 he received the inaugural Kukula Award for Excellence in Non-fiction Book Reviewing from the Washington Monthly.

With the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union

©2020 Andrey Kurkov (P)2022 Quercus Editions Limited
Fiction Friendship Literary Fiction Russia Small Town & Rural War
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

The Partisan Heart cover art
The Orphanage cover art
So Late in the Day cover art
The War Came to Us cover art
The Lover cover art
Fatal Ally cover art
A Bird in Winter cover art
Tasting Sunlight cover art
The Drowned Village cover art
Everyday Kindness cover art
An Act of Love cover art
Goodbye to Budapest cover art

Critic reviews

"A latter-day Bulgakov... A Ukrainian Murakami." (Phoebe Taplin, Guardian)

What listeners say about Grey Bees

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    18
  • 4 Stars
    10
  • 3 Stars
    7
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    18
  • 4 Stars
    4
  • 3 Stars
    5
  • 2 Stars
    4
  • 1 Stars
    1
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    18
  • 4 Stars
    8
  • 3 Stars
    6
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

overrated

overall, rather dull. The central character was likeable. dont really understand the rave reviews. wouldn't recommend.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Back on form

The clipped understated style reminiscent of Death of a Penguin. You can feel the main character's bewilderment with the abstract notion of patriotism and the lack of empathy two warring sides need to be able to kill.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

the beekeepers endurance!

A road trip with the bees and more, very heart warming. To live in hope a beebed vibrates healing powers beyond.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

fable of life under conflict

I enjoyed the novel, but wasn't convinced by the reader, whose delivery is rather flat. There are also occasional oddities of punctuation, which is off-putting. Somewhat to my surprise this didn't spoil the book and the reader does do a very good job of distinguishing the voices of the different characters, with styles appropriate to the personality and use of accents to indicate when Sergeyich is meeting people from a different background.

I bought this anticipating a novel that would give me some insight into what 'ordinary' life is like on the fringes of a conflict and I wasn't disappointed. The writing is almost entirely shorn of descriptive language, but the pared down style suits the subject matter and serves to point up Sergeyich's flights of imagination and strange dreams.

What I hadn't expected is how well the novel illustrates the way in which being untethered from all the things that give a structure to life under normal circumstances makes people eccentric, even slightly unhinged. It's an accurate, moving and gently comic portrayal of loneliness.

I found the ending unsatisfactory. There's a moment of positivity that's clearly engineered for structural reasons, but other than this, the novel doesn't so much eschew a conventional resolution - which would have seemed absurd - as peter out, cutting short the narrative arc I'd expected and leaving Sergeyich on the road. There's a neat enough concluding sentence, but I still feel the ending undercuts the book's message about sense of place.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

77 chapters and the end is...?

long book although short chapters after all that the ending wasn't great. is there a sequel? bit disappointed. enjoyed the narrator tho.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

A story like honey vodka

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would; I loved the juxtaposition of a sweet life embracing nature and kindness in the context of a very real war. The performance was excellent, with just the right change in tone for each character.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Beautiful writing about a simple man

I would have loved an accompanying map. So I could locate the different places. The writing is poetic and I loved it from the first minute. I loved the narrator to, he spoke very clearly and I really enjoyed his voice.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!