An ebullient black comedy... Reminiscent of the best Soviet dissident literature

Full of touches of grim insight and tactful surrealism, with just enough of the absurd to suggest a cross between John le Carre's Smiley and Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita

Kurkov is a fine satirist and a real, blackly comic find

Kurkov flips from mock-tragedy to comedy and back again, planting the ominous and the absurd neatly among deadpan descriptions of a daily life in denial

Kurkov received universal praise for his debut novel Death and the Penguin... Kurkov's latest is better

Pacey and exhilarating

Complex thriller

I really enjoyed it and loved the central character of Detective Catrin Price and closed the book wanting to read more of her in future books.

The narrative has a convincing air when dealing with Cardiff, the forensic background, rock music and, above all, pharmacological details.

An author of consistently engaging and clever bestsellers, Kennedy has ranged from Stateside dramas to noirish thrillers. The Moment pulls together both strains in his fiction, marrying romantic tragedy with Le Carre-style espionage. The novel's set pieces are robustly staged and Kennedy turns the plot on its axis several times. The sadness at the heart of the novel is what makes it more than just an evocative recreation of an interesting time and place.

5 stars