Bright and very talented actress Bertha Ulrich from a family of Volga Germans spends her final years in a nursing home somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow. In her past—love and fame, passionate romances and major premieres; but in the present, she’s needed by no one except the porcelain dolls she collects on her bedside table. Yet Bertha’s life changes when a couple of in-love students appear—people who don’t care only about themselves and are concerned about what will happen to Bertha… One of the most piercing novels about the link between generations and about the fact that there are no such things as “other people’s old folks.”