Pyotr Nesterenko is on first-name terms with death. As director of the Moscow Crematorium during the Stalin era, he has reduced them all to ash: the dissidents, the alleged spies, and the former heroes of the Revolution who have fallen victim to the purges.
He, on the other hand, is convinced he cannot die. He has narrowly escaped death countless times – until the day he himself is arrested. Will he cheat the gallows one more time?

A journalist who knows too much. A son who betrays his father. A merciless oligarch. A corrupt, unscrupulous hack. Media that tear down reputations to order. 

Sasha Filipenko tells the story of Anton Quint, an idealistic journalist who decides to take on an oligarch. His powerful opponent gives the order to destroy Quint – and so the hunt is on. 

After being trampled at a mass panic in his Belarusian hometown, 16-year-old music student Zisk falls into a coma. Most people give up on him, his girlfriend, his mother, his doctor. Only his grandmother Elvira Alexandrovna stays by his side and sees to it that he is taken care of - for days, months, years. Zisk's mother falls in love with the doctor and has a baby with him. After ten years, at the very moment when Zisk is told that his grandmother has died, he wakes up. He realizes that his family has moved on to another period in their lives, that they don't want him anymore. The country as a whole, however, is still governed by the same authoritarian president, the general brain drain persists, the police quickly smother any kind of protest. Will Zisk find his place in Belarus?

A great Russian novel in only 280 pages – from Stalin’s terror to the present day.

One fights against forgetting, the other would like nothing more than that.

She is suffering from Alzheimer’s, losing more and more memories. But once you meet this old lady, you’ll never forget her.

Alexander is a young man whose life has been brutally torn in two. Tatiana Alexeyevna is over ninety and getting more forgetful by the day. The old lady tells her new neighbour her life story, encompassing the entire Russian 20th century and all its horrors. And she tells him: »God is afraid of me. There are too many uncomfortable questions coming His way.«

Bit by bit, the two recognize their own broken hearts in each other and forge an unlikely friendship, a pact against forgetting.