Iryna Tokarchuk

A determined student from Chicago is forced to fulfill the last wish of his ailing grandfather. He has to travel to Odessa, Ukraine, and bring back his grandfather's cat.

In the old days it was called hypochrondria, or black melancholia. Now, apparently, it's termed the Asthenic Syndrome. Whatever it is, Nikolai, a teacher of epicly indifferent pupils, has got it, and it's not much fun.

Lesya has committed a crime of passion which brings her a seven-year sentence in one of Odesa’s women’s correctional facilities. She has just given birth to her first child, and now she is entering a world populated only by women: inmates, nurses and wardens, women of all ages, wives and widows, daughters, sisters, pregnant women, and women with children too. If not for the color of the uniform, it would sometimes be hard to tell who is who.

In a small, poor town, a young worker falls in love with an actress from a traveling theater troupe and tries to keep her close, dreaming and working hard to rebuild a new town while the troupe increasingly faces decline and the end of its run.

In the 1950s Odessa a charming woman is running an underground brothel. She's tired of the business hassles and is dreaming about having a family. Finally the destiny gives her a chance, but there's no way out.

More than twenty years ago, the village of Luzhnoye was declared unpromising and the floodplain meadows were plowed. But there were people who wanted to revive the fertile lands and the abandoned village...

...Her son-in-law, Ippolit Matwejewitch Worobjaninow, is a former nobleman and a dandy who is currently wasting away as a small town magistrate in charge of civil marriages. He eagerly takes up the quest to find the treasure. Meanwhile, over the years, the twelve chairs have been dispersed all over the country. However, Worobjaninow is not the only one in pursuit of the treasure. Hot on its trail are Ostap Bender, a clever and colorful conman, as well as Father Fjodor, a priest to whom the wealthy aristocrat has also confessed her secret. Thus begins a wild chase that ranges from North to South, West to East, across water and land, from the country to the city.

A few days from the life of the sex workers...