Daniel Wallace is a modern American classic, a worthy successor to the traditions of Ray Bradbury and Saul Bellow, Harper Lee and John Updike. His debut novel Big Fish was the basis for Tim Burton's film, starring Ewan McGregor, Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, Danny DeVito. The Watermelon King is set in "a brilliant modern combination of Chaucer and Roald Dahl ", according to one critic) takes place in the town of Ashland, already familiar to readers of Big Fish - the "watermelon capital of the world." The key to Ashland's prosperity is an annual fertility ritual, a kind of sacrifice of the last virgin, and some details of the ritual are devoutly guarded from outsiders. And so Thomas Ryder comes to the city, knowing only that he was born here and his mother died here. Trying to isolate grains of truth from the endless tales of the dreamer-grandfather who raised him, he still does not realize that the long-term intrigue is close to completion and that he is being tipped for the role of the next Watermelon King... For the first time in Russian.