Sasha Filipenko traces the arc of Russian history from Stalin’s terror to the present day,  in a  novel full of heart and humanity.

One struggles not to forget, while the other would like nothing better. Tatiana Alexeyevna is an old woman, over ninety, rich in lived experience, and suffering from Alzheimer’s. Every day, she loses a few more of her irreplaceable memories. Alexander is a young man whose life has been brutally torn in two. 

Tatiana tells her young neighbor her life story, a story that encompasses the entire Russian 20th century with all its horrors and hard-won humanity. 

Little by little, the old woman and the young man forge an unlikely friendship and make a pact against forgetting.

Sasha Filipenko
Sasha Filipenko, born in Minsk in 1984, is a Belarusian author who writes in Russian. After abandoning his classical music training, he studied literature in St. Petersburg and worked as a journalist, screenwriter and author for a satire show. Sasha Filipenko lives in St. Petersburg.

• Nov 2 2021
  “100 years of Russian history in under 200 pages.”
  — PopMatters
• Oct 13 2021
  “Moving.”
  — Oprah Daily
• Sep 9 2021
  “...nothing unlocks the human soul as profoundly as a novel can.”
  — Los Angeles Review of Books
• Aug 24 2021
  “...brings freshness and wit to a familiar story.”
  — Publishers Weekly