Ksyu. Tree. Accident. Stories

The new book by prose writer and screenwriter Alexey Slapovsky consists of a novel and stories and demonstrates the author's virtuoso ability to tell stories that can become films. «Now that I am dead, I can say whatever I want and however I want». Thus begins the «otherworldly story» of an 18-year-old girl whose father, a very high-ranking official, was caught in a bribery case, was tried and imprisoned. The heroine learns more and more about her father, her mother, their friends and acquaintances, and then leaves, just like in the classics, «to her aunt, into the wilderness, to Saratov», where she experiences new recognition—people from social strata with which she had never crossed paths before. In fact, it is a matter of looking into oneself and into the world—as if her eyes have opened, as if she has begun to live anew, noticing things she had not seen before. «Tree» is also a first-person story. An quite elderly man was walking down the street past a tree, remembered how he used to climb it as a child. He just took and climbed it again. And his life changed radically after that. «Accident» is a cycle of six stories about people who were going somewhere, rushing, making plans, and then a mass car accident occurs, and time seems to stop—and what now? Is it always so bad to end up in such a situation or can it turn life to a better side? Or at least to a different one? Thus, the accident is something like a metaphor for the very pandemic that we all faced.