The new book of the famous Siberian writer Anatoly Bayborodin opens with the story “Quench My Sorrows,” which captures the fate of the Transbaikal family: family customs, love and dislike, sins and illnesses, hope for salvation. The story “Bitterness” is a collision of two worlds: the world of a remote fishing village of the second half of the 20th century, where the original moral principles miraculously survived, and the world of urban artistic bohemia, permeated with “philosophical” cynicism and nihilism. The story “White Steppe” is about the youthful love of a Russian boy from an Old Believer family and a girl from the ancient Buryat family of Khori in the Trans-Baikal lands, where Russian fishermen and taiga dwellers and Buryats - shepherds and hunters lived with folk wisdom and natural beauty, in fraternal friendship.