Author: Marina Smybysheva, "Simonov and the Heron: a novel": "Simonov and the Heron" is a mystical and philosophical novel about the adventures of Judas Iscariot, condemned to eternal life for his sin. Always staying at the age of forty, the hero of the novel wanders the world, experiencing the torments of loneliness, love and betrayal. Trying to survive in new, alien times and countries, he learns and teaches, meets and breaks up, falls in love and loses loved ones. His contemporaries disappear into oblivion, but he remains and continues his endless life, painful and full of hardships, but not devoid of occasional glimpses of happiness. The hero's fate turns out to be closely connected with a mysterious artifact - a silver statuette of a heron: in it he finds a testament to liberation from his curse. Following this testament, the hero over the centuries gets acquainted with three characters who are imbued with sincere love for him, but in the end betray him, each for his own reason. A young Vascon woman involved in the war between the Basques and the Franks that broke out in the 8th century; an English artist obsessed with art and creativity at the end of the 16th century; a Leningrad graduate student tormented by unhappy love in the late 1980s - all of them play a key role in the hero's fulfillment of the task formulated in the redemptive parchment. The author masterfully intertwines the genres of historical novel, philosophical detective story and mystical parable, revealing the tragedy of immortality and the problems of eternal life, as well as themes of betrayal, spiritual search, obsession with revenge, art and science.