Counterclockwise

13 hrs. 55 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Elena Katishonok

Narrator Vyacheslav Gerasimov

One of the main “heroes” of the novel is time. It rules over human destinies, changing names of streets and flipping generations like pages of a book. Time has a willful way of handling the fate of the main heroine, Irina.

She gave birth to two children, but raised and brought up three. Impossibly honest, she nearly ends up in prison… When, after the war, Irina returns to her hometown, it appears just as wounded as her own life. The children grow up and no longer remember what she knows and remembers. Or don’t they want to?—But that means her grandchildren will never learn about the past: it slips away without leaving a trace in reality, yet continues to live on in memory, dreams, and conversations with those who are no longer there. The only way to stop the moment is to remember it and pass that memory to a person of another time, a new generation.

The book continues the story of the Ivanov family—the children of those very elderly people whose account was told in the author’s first book (“Once There Was an Old Man with an Old Woman”).

1. Once Upon a Time There Lived an Old Man and an Old Woman (narrated by Tatyana Telegina) 2. Counterclockwise 3. Light in the Window (narrated by Irina Vorobyova)