“The woman woke up from the rumble of wheels. It seems that the train flew at full speed onto an all-metal bridge over a ravine with a river flowing below, missed it and rushed on, tapping on the rail joints with the same rhythmic monotony...” This is how this novel by Anatoly Kurchatkin begins. His heroes are rushing on a certain train - and they have been rushing for a long time, days pass, years pass, but they still rush, and there is no end to their path, and what is its goal? They don’t remember that for a long time, they got used to their life on the road, in the cramped compartment, with its discomfort, disorder, temporaryness, which has become commonplace. Their life is strange, their friends are strange: a giraffe, an American who has the appearance of a fan, the customs reigning on the train are strange, what is imposed by the train authorities, and why is eternal night reigning in the space that the train tears? The surreal reality of the novel’s artistic world is an expanded metaphor for the real reality in which any resident of Russia lives today. An extremely modern and highly social novel was written by Anatoly Kurchatkin. Add to this a brilliant writer's imagination and a magnificent, sophisticated, light style.