As provocative and spiky as Look Who's Back, Michael Honig's The Senility of Vladimir P is a strangely moving, blackly funny and frankly brilliant calling to account of Vladimir Putin, of power and greed, and of our own moral complicity.

A vodka-soaked tragicomedy of bribes, backhanders and a certain ex-president of Russia going catastrophically awry.

Former Russian president, Vladimir P, is going senile, marooned in a world of memories from his years in power. To get him out of the way, he has been exiled to his luxury dacha, where he is served by a coterie of bickering house staff. Only Sheremetev, the guileless nurse charged with Vladimir's round-the-clock care, is unaware that everyone else is busily using every means at their disposal to skim money from their employer's inexhaustible riches. But when the nurse suddenly needs to find cash for a bribe or see his nephew rot in jail, the dacha's chef lets him in on the secret world of 'commissions' going on all around him. Yet surely Sheremetev wouldn't think to steal from his ailing patient? And surely, in the upstanding modern Russia that Vladimir P created, no one would actually let him...

"Sharp, spare, entertaining... Savour the quips and enjoy the show" - Independent

"Amid its screwball rage this very funny book is also an unexpectedly touching one" - Spectator

"A scathing satire... The Senility of Vladimir P is a clear attack on the corruption and greed of Putin's Russia and a sharp reminder of how authoritarian rule can infect a generation" - Independent

"Blackly comic... A novel about an innocent who learns too late that when a country goes to the dogs, so, all too often, do its people" - Daily Mail

"An exciting tale of how even the best men can face temptation" - Irish Examiner

"A story worth telling. Many of the events described are happening now and often not very far away" - Guardian