Rachel Vanderlinden's husband went abroad and never returned. Instead, one day a stranger appeared on the doorstep and said: “I am your husband.” And the woman let him into the house and never asked questions again. But many years later, her son Thomas, a polymath and bibliophile, goes to the ends of the earth to search for the two mysterious people with whom his mother shared her life - and in his journey takes him to the extreme limits of love, loss and the mystical understanding of the female and male souls. Adventures take the heroes to the City of One-Legged Men and tribes of fish-lickers and lizard people, to a Tibetan monastery, to the Broken Shoal and to the Institute of the Lost. But the most incomprehensible mystery remains the person living nearby...

The bewitching novel by Canadian writer Eric McCormack (b. 1938) “The Flying Dutchman” is an exotic tale of wanderings, unpredictable and ambiguous. For the first time in Russian.

Remember Borges, Michael Ende, Kobo Abe. Now you understand about McCormack. Edgy, quirky, refreshingly detached macabre.

Time Out, London