The new book by the famous St. Petersburg writer Valery Popov, winner of the Big Book Prize, consists of two stories united by the figure of a lyrical hero. In the first story, the author immerses the reader in the recent past, recalling the fate of his cousins, with whom, in addition to ties of kinship, he was bound for life by ties of selfless friendship. The characters in the second story, on the contrary, are acutely aware of the theme of today, the fears and hopes caused by the circumstances of the epidemic. The author's ironic intonation is alien to pathos; the caricatured everyday circumstances are as dramatic as they are comical. The narrator allows himself to laugh at himself heartily from the heights of his years, which have endowed him with wisdom, which - alas - always coexists with sadness.