History teacher Nikolay Echevin on his sixtieth birthday receives an anonymous letter in which he is called the "center of public infection" and threatened with murder.
The Italians, conquered by the Tatar singer's skill, offer him a contract. By the will of circumstances, Renat gets first to Yalta and only then on the yacht of a drug dealer to Italy. Here the hero finds himself in prison, meets an Italian beauty and is carried away in a hot air balloon...
A story about the life of a woman, two men of her life and her son, Janek Garbus, seen through the eyes of the latter - "conceived by an NKVD uncle on the night after the Soviet army entered".
A young girl finds herself in a quiet town in Portugal, where a peculiar and unsettling form of therapy opens up to her as the ideal way to conquer her overwhelming grief after a recent personal tragedy.
