Moscow, during the collapse of the Soviet system: In a hospital, young people awaiting heart operations and possible death, live just for today with mischief-making and even love affairs, under the stringent gaze of the old matron, Baba Nastya. Here one of the patients, a young Turkmen, meets a Greek Comsomol boy, a Russian Stalinist with a 'robotic' heart, and the lovely but tragic Mary. To whom does the future belong - to the soulless robots or the poetical souls?

Some time in the 1970s, Konstantin Alpheyev, a well-known Russian musicologist, finds himself in trouble with the KGB, the Russian secret police, after the death of his girlfriend, for which one of their officers may have been responsible. He has to flee from the city and to go into hiding. He rents an old house located on the bank of a big Russian river, and lives there like a recluse observing nature and working on his new book about Wagner. The house, a part of an old barge, undergoes stra...

Is it possible to cultivate fundamental human values if you live in a totalitarian state? A teacher who has organised the school theatre sets out to prove that it is. Whilst the pupils rehearse Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies under her ever-vigilant eye, Soviet life begins to make its brutal adjustments. This story can be called a book about love, the tough kind of love that gets you through life and death.

Little Zinnobers is especially fascinating for British readers as we see Shakespea...

Srđan Srdić's collection of short stories, Combustions, establishes this author's position as one of the best prose writers in Serbia and across the region. This book consists of nine stories in which the author brings the reader face to face with the seamy side of everyday life, where, somewhere in the province, hopelessness and despair of the endless Balkan transition meet one another in the most radical way. Devoid of illusions of social engagement and narrative tricks, Srdić linguistic...