The 1970s, Zanzibar forgets about the recent conflict, and a time of change begins. Salim's father left the family and shut himself off from his son with icy silence. His mother started seeing another man and gave birth to a daughter. The silence created a sense of deception, and unanswered questions remained unanswered. Burdened with family secrets, the pain of rejection, and the hope of seeing the wider world, Salim travels to London to get an education and repay a debt he doesn't know about yet. The new novel by the Nobel laureate in literature is published in Russian for the first time. My entire childhood could well have consisted of the fruits of someone else's fantasy: one told me one thing about those years, the other — another, and I simply agreed with the more persistent of them or chose the look that I liked best. Flap cover with perforation on one flap (tear-off bookmark). No one explained to me how much baseness there was in this world, and I looked at it like an idiot, not understanding anything. Readers of intellectual literature who are on the topic of the global agenda follow the news and various opinions.