Strawberry Season

The story takes place in a not-so-distant past: from the beginning of perestroika and up to almost today. These are difficult times—times of change, revaluation of values, and the period of accumulating capital, unraveling, and dismantling… The protagonists of the novella, in the middle of the eighties—together with the whole country—begin a new life, confronting the problems of the new era. New laws of life, the laws of business, where there is no place for morals and conventions, where human life is devalued and money decides everything. This book will remind you of the times when racketeering and mafia showdowns flourished, and the corruption of officials was commonplace—that was the time of the birth of a new country. Sergei Alikhanov was the first in our literature to put us face to face with the nature of the emergence of those Russians who very soon became masters of their own lives. Those whose grip and genius created unimaginable, billion-level fortunes out of nothing. Russia was given a chance that “only once in a century comes—and only in one particular country.” Sergei Alikhanov knows the world of people who took advantage of that chance: he knows their life and customs, habits and preferences, their psychology—and it’s no wonder the novella was written as if from the inside of that world. Their life is seen here as if through their own eyes, and the story is told in the way they would probably tell about themselves—within their own circle, where there’s no need to be embarrassed and where each word of their semi-criminal slang is understood by everyone. The novella “Strawberry Time” was adapted into a 14-episode TV film “Games of Throwing the Jack”…