Nadezhda Anikeeva

A funeral bus gets stuck in the snow-covered vast expanses on the way to the cemetery. Instead of solving the problem, family members sort things out with each other. The family is falling apart before our eyes, and only the deceased grandfather will help save it.

Ira is 27 years old. And from the point of view of her mother, the director of the school, Ira lives absolutely wrong: she plays in the troupe of a small theater, earns money by washing windows and is in love with an unreliable creative person Leo, an aspiring director. She ignores "normal" men and does not even want to dye her hair blonde, which, according to her mother, is an easy way to success in her personal life. This state of affairs could continue for a long time, but the theater is on the verge of closing, and Lev suddenly disappears.

Russia, early 90s. Mariya, the owner of a small video rental store in an abandoned cinema, has her son disappear under strange circumstances. To understand what happened and find her son, Mariya has to cross the path of crime boss Egor Bocharov, make friends with fugitive criminal Dmitriy Shilin, reveal the secret of the ghost living in the cinema and find out how he is connected with the mysterious film number 8.

Found unconscious and robbed on a beach in Thailand, 70-year old Xenophon only knows his own name because it was engraved on his old Soviet watch. He’s been left with no money and no identification…and he doesn’t speak a word of Thai. But Xenophon is a resourceful man. He begins to build a new life with friends and a new business, but there’s something disturbing in his past that he can only glimpse through his shattered memory. Is he really who he seems?

A young and ambitious journalist has to lose herself to find love in the most unlikely of places. After traveling to a desert island in search of a mysterious hermit, all Nina can think of is her scoop and discovering what makes a man leave the rest of the world behind. But as a storm strikes, she finds herself immersed in a world of deceit, human vice and a fight for survival. Navigating the island wilderness, she soon realizes the real discovery is what she learns about herself, and the prize is true love.

The author of The Kolyma Stories and many other works spent 17 years in the terrible GULAG camps on Kolyma. The term that Varlam Tikhonovich received in 1929 was for distributing Lenin's letter to the congress, in which he criticized Stalin. Nowadays, this letter is called the "testament of Lenin"…