A Boy's Oath

THIS IS A NOVEL ABOUT BOYS WHO WERE READY TO GO TO DEATH FOR LOYALTY TO THEIR OATH.
The Great country is living out its last years. Teenagers who in an instant lost their old goals and meaning in life form packs, where together they look for new kinds of entertainment: alcohol, “stuff,” fights…
Guys with character, with a fury, build muscles, shave their heads, and then roam markets and extort money. The number of gangs grows rapidly, and soon the boys become cramped even in the enormous megacity.
Kesha is only fifteen. In recent times he lives with his mother and stepfather in Lyubertsy. The boy is strong-willed and reckless; harsh life taught him long ago—he ended up in a children’s home where, after his birth, his mother placed him.
At his new school, he quickly got close to the “lyuber” boys and joined one of the sports groups…

The author of the novel, Vladimir Bogdanov, whose youth fell on the years of the collapse of the Soviet Union—when morality and values, life ideals and everything else were crumbling—passed through dramatic trials in a youth group. There he learned both friendship and betrayal, loyalty to one’s word and love.

— “Vladimir Bogdanov’s writing is a heart-tightening nostalgia, it’s an incredibly vivid and juicy world of youth, it’s when everything is at maximum: feelings, loyalty, vows, fights… You just marvel at how important for us back then were the notions of Honor, Friendship, Love. The book tears at the soul with its directness and sincerity, and at the same time it heals…”
— Aleksei MAKEEV, writer, co-author of detective novels about the investigator Gurov