Dear readers, you are holding in your hands the novel “Number One, or In the Gardens of Other Possibilities” by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. This book is not like everything that this author has written so far. This is a mystical thriller, a book of transformations. The transmigration of souls (metempsychosis), which began in the taiga, at the sacred place of worship of a passing civilization, leads to a chain of events - death for one day and the resurrection of dead children, the execution of an actress in front of a video camera and a series of brilliant thefts. A sick child will save his mother. And a three-hundred-year-old pike man will appear in our world, where altars are burning everywhere - the lights of computer games...