About the book: year / The novel is a continuation of "The Hearth on the Tower", but can also be read as an almost independent work - although it has the same effects as in " Hearth,” heroes who have aged seven or eight years. “The Man Opposite” is written in the author’s favorite genre of socio-psychological detective story, the events of which unfold in an alternative world. The time fork here is very close to our time - an alternative world was created by the victory of the Kremlin putschists in August 1991. The action of the novel itself takes place in 1996 in a Russia that has preserved the pseudo-socialist system, but is even more territorially fragmented than in our reality. For the sake of his son’s life, the main character of the first novel, an idealistic scientist who, thanks to his discovery, has acquired fantastic, almost divine possibilities for influencing the world, is forced to begin a battle, the scale of which even he is initially unable to imagine. In order to win it, he has to, in the end, replace one story with another, drag Yeltsin, dying in a comfortable cell, out of a Moscow prison and seat him in the presidential chair... and in the end be horrified that the new world is little better than the one had to be destroyed. There are no ideal options in history, you can only choose from two or more evils - but it is inevitable that you will be responsible for everything bad that will bring with it, even the least, but still evil.