In his previous novel ("Red Cross", 2017), Sasha Filipenko extensively used real historical documents. In his new work, the depicted reality itself aspires to be a document of the era. For the most skeptical: nothing here is fictional.

There is a small town where the main enterprise is a prison. There is an orphanage where a glimpse of happiness has touched the lives of its residents. Situations, characters, dialogues, and even the methods of police torture are all drawn from real life. The haunting question about the cost of good deeds, which somehow turn into evil, is also posed by life itself. More precisely, by death.

"Sasha Filipenko belongs to those young authors who immediately became serious writers. If you want to know what contemporary young Russia thinks, read Filipenko" (Svetlana Alexievich).