A Thief, a Spy and a Murderer

Yury Buida is the author of the novels “Speech Gift” and “The Fifth Kingdom,” and the short story collection “The Prussian Bride,” along with other books published in Russia, France, the UK, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Norway. In the novel “Thief, Spy, and Murderer” (the “Big Book” award), the hero stubbornly pursues the profession of a writer—“the craft of a thief, a spy, and a killer. The writer watches, listens, steals other people’s traits and words—and then transfers all of it onto paper, stops moments, as Goethe said—that is, kills the living for the sake of the beautiful.”
A completely different time (the 1950s–1980s) and an entirely different place (the captivating everyday life of small towns in Kaliningrad Oblast, recent Prussia); the memory that “the world lies in evil,” the list of mortal sins, human pettiness and cruelty—yet the ability to see divine beauty in all of this; love, passion, and death—all converge on the pages of this novel.