That is life'. How many times each of us heard, and he repeated these words, lamenting the injustice of fate, the impossibility of changing anything in it. The heroes of the stories collected in this book are well aware of what losses, disappointments, an

You're back home after four years working abroad, new husband in tow. You're keen to find a place of your own. But for now, you're crashing in your big brother's spare room. That's when you meet the man next door. He's the head teacher at the local school

In one of the books, Aleksandr Etoev said of the city in which he was born: 'Living almost desperate in it, I changed so many districts, streets, houses, apartments that the whole city became my eternal home. Everywhere I go, on any bench in any square, garden I sit down, poplars, garden grates, fountains, even urns and lanterns smile at me, they feel my local, post-war Leningrader in me, they...

The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappe

Flora 717 is a sanitation worker, a member of the lowest caste in her orchard hive where work and sacrifice are the highest virtues and worship of the beloved Queen the only religion. But Flora is not like other bees. With circumstances threatening the hi

It is the spring of 1939, and three generations of the Kurc family are doing their best to live normal lives, even as the shadow of war grows closer. The talk around the family Seder table is of new babies and budding romance, not of the increasing hardsh

Winner Pulitzer Prize. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhoodùwhere even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as...

'Just Masa' is Masahiro Shibata alone, without Fandorin. The orphaned assistant of the great detective returns to his native Japan, which has changed very much during the wanderings of his prodigal son - and has remained forever unchanged. An incredible s

Viktor Petrovich Astafiev is a classic of 20th-century Russian prose, a laureate of two USSR State Prizes, the independent Triumph Prize, the State Prize of Russia and others. He received his first prize in 1978 for narrating in the stories 'King of the F

The villagers had never seen anything like it: dense white curtains of snow that instantly transformed the landscape. Not in autumn, not here in Burgundy. And on the same night a baby was discovered, dark-eyed little Maria, who would transform all their l

It's 1988 and Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley have only just met. But after only one day together, they cannot stop thinking about one another. Over twenty years, snapshots of that relationship are revealed on the same day - July 15th - of each year. Dex an

Someone is looking for love on the World Wide Web, and someone in an abandoned village. Someone travels the globe for love, while others are ready to exchange big cities for a small island. Wherever the action takes place, the reader suddenly recognizes h