Tanya’s father, a twelve-year-old girl, dies in a terrorist attack in the Rostov region. Through living with this grief and telling her own story, the growing heroine makes sense of the history of her country. Studying literature of Russian emigration and exploring her own past in sessions with a psychologist, she views her relationship with her father through the lens of culture—turning to other people’s stories: the experience of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, the way fathers are perceived by Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Ryzhy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Peter Esterházy, and others well-known writers.