The novel “Hugging Time” is a fascinating family saga that has everything that the reader likes so much: complex destinies, passions, separations, betrayals, the tragic blindness of loved ones and their sudden insights... But not only! This is also a philosophical drama about the price of life and death, how the past overtakes and kills; it’s not for nothing that the title contains words from the Book of Ecclesiastes. This narrative is a hymn to family: hugs, sentiment, the sweet little things in life, and devoted mutual love, its only unbreakable foundation. With gentle irony, the author talks about several generations of St. Petersburg intelligentsia, their touching concern for “their circle” and the indispensable cultural education of children, love for literature and music and rejection of rudeness. And this is St. Petersburg - beautiful and beloved, containing the joys and sorrows of the heroes of the novel, and the ever-living poems of Pushkin and Akhmatova, woven into a long, long history.