The Bad Weather

2008. A simple driver, a former soldier of the Afghan war, single-handedly pulls off a daring robbery of a special van transporting money for a large shopping center. That’s how, in a million-strong but provincial city of Batuev, ends a long story of the powerful, active union of Afghan veterans—either a public organization, or a business alliance, or a criminal group. In the “wild nineties,” when this union formed and gained strength, it was hard to tell one thing from another. But the novel isn’t about money and not about crime—it’s about the bad weather in the soul. About desperate searching for the reason why a person must trust a person in a world where only predators triumph—but without trust life is impossible. The novel is about the fact that greatness and despair have the same roots. About how each of us risks, by accident, falling into despair—and never getting out again, because despair is both refuge and trap, salvation and ruin, a great consolation and an eternal pain of life.