Every novel by Anna Михальская is an exploration of Love with many faces in one of its incarnations. The heroine faces a test—no, a challenge—an intense, painfully sharp experience of the loss of love embodied in the Word, the collapse not only of her personal fate but of the entire world of Russian culture, values, and human relationships—swept away by the whirlwinds of the 90s.
The plot is tense and paradoxical, yet its unpredictable turns somehow turn out to be perfectly natural; strange coincidences become omens—of death or salvation? Is it possible to play with fate and raise the stakes? Not just survive, but preserve and pass on something that could cost lives?
Innovative in form, this work recreates the structure of an ancient text, seethes with ancient Greek passions, where the prose of life unexpectedly soars into the high sky of poetry.