It is the 1930s, and the American government is trying to poach the USSR's most famous botanist, Ivan Michurin, whose experimental fruit trees are ensuring bounteous harvests for the Motherland.

Encouraged by the Soviet authorities, Michurin agrees to the proposal, and American scientists and engineers dig up his orchards and build a floating island to carry his specimens across the ocean.

The floating orchard, propelled by three gigantic diesel engines, sets off on its long journey via a route calculated by ocean current experts. But Michurin gets wind that his island is a Trojan horse, and that he is a figurehead of a secret plot to cripple the most powerful capitalist country in the world. The fate of millions now lies in his hands.

Set in an alternative USSR in which Kalinin not Stalin succeeded Lenin, Mr Muchurin's Gardens takes a myth about a legend of Soviet botany and runs with it, treating readers to all the delights of Kurkov's unique sense of the absurd along the way.

Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk