About the book: 2007 / “The Librarian” is the fourth and largest book by the brilliant debutant of the 1990s. This is, in fact, the first great post-Soviet novel, the reaction of the generation of 30-year-olds to the world in which they found themselves. Behind the fantastic plot lies a parable, a southern Russian tale of lost time, false nostalgia and a barbaric present. The main character, an eternal loser-student, an “extra” person who does not fit into capitalism, finds himself drawn into the thick of a bloody war waged between the so-called “libraries” over the legacy of the Soviet writer D. A. Gromov. Gromov is an ordinary writer of the second or third tier, whose novels about the everyday work of collective farmers and the feat of the Narva outpost seemed to have long since sunk into oblivion, along with the country that gave birth to them. But, as it turned out, not forever. For those who were able to observe the rules of Care and Continuity when reading, it was discovered that these were not just waste paper, but books of Memory, Power, Patience, Rage, Strength and - the rarest - Meaning... A whole reality unfolds around the books, sometimes reminiscent of an action-packed thriller, sometimes an action movie, sometimes a conspiracy novel, but the main thing is that in the blurred contours of this skillfully invented reality, as in a mirror, many readers whose childhood began before perestroika recognize themselves and their history. For others, this world, half assembled from real facts of a recent but irretrievably past time, half invented, will seem no less fantastic than the dying profession of a librarian. While still in manuscript, the novel was included in the long lists of the “National Bestseller” and “Big Book” awards.».