Five prose works by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya are collected under one cover for the first time - from the famous short novel “Time is Night”, in the early 90s. shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and the story “One’s Own Circle” (and these texts were published in millions of copies and were staged as one-man shows in Russia and abroad) to not so well-known things: the early “Observation Deck”, then “Little Terrible”, a family saga about the autocratic queen of a home hive, and “Candy with Liqueur,” an action-packed story about a plan for absolute murder that was carried out, but not as intended. This book by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is dedicated to love - or rather, it is dedicated to different cases of love, starting from almost childish, hopeless and eternal, and ending with smart and wise love, ready for anything, forgiving and saving. The writer, apparently, knows a lot of stories, and sometimes they are almost like fairy tales with a happy ending, and sometimes they are like old ballads in which only love remains immortal.