A young boy from the housing estates comes across a copse of old oaks to which he can escape, as to an oasis of calm. Although he may forget about it once he becomes an adult and "puts aside the things of childhood," it will remain a locus of balance, decades later, for a single mother struggling with the difficulties of raising the child she loves. A husband, on the lip of an ugly divorce, drives across town in the middle of the night to rescue his wife, abandoned by her lover, and then - as...

A brilliant satirist, Ostap Vyshnia (1889-1956) sent up the shortcomings of Soviet life and bureaucracy in the 1920s. He was famous in Ukraine almost exclusively for his feuilletons, and achieved enormous popularity in this genre in the 1920s, especially among the peasant population. Called by many the father of contemporary Ukrainian satire, he became the most-read author after Taras Shevchenko. Many village and town cooperatives, schools and farms were spontaneously named in his honour. Ove...

This book features people from one of the most closed countries of today's world, where the passage of time resembles the passage of a caravan through the waterless desert. This world has been recreated by a true-born son of that mysterious country, a Turkmen who, at the will of fate, has now been living for a quarter of a century in snowy Scandinavia. Is that not why two different worlds come together in Ryazan horseradish and Tula gingerbread, to come apart in Love in Lilac, in which a stu...