Diamonds for the Boulevard Ring

I knew everything about life—until I ended up here.

USSR, late 1970s.

Yesterday’s student Oleg Khaidarov, from utterly peaceful and carefree Moscow, finds himself in war-torn Angola burning with fighting. The country has just parted with its colonial past and is already plunged into a bloody civil slaughter that will drag on for two decades. War grinds down personal relationships, youthful romanticism, and children’s notions of good and evil. Here, books become useless scrap paper; wild beasts in the African savanna take on unmistakably human features; Freedom turns into a ghost of a long and thorny path into infinity; the homeland ends in lies and betrayal of close people—and begins again when hope, faith, and love appear…