For the first time in Russian, the newest novel from the famous Nick Hornby, author of such bestsellers as “Hi-Fi”, “My Boy”, “The Long Fall”, etc., which have sold over five million copies around the world and have been successfully filmed. As critics have written, “Hornby has been a consistently successful defender of popular culture against intellectual snobbery,” and “Funny Girl” sounds like a declaration of love for an important element of that culture: the classic sitcom. So Barbara Parker wins the Miss Blackpool competition, but she doesn't want to be a beauty queen. She wants to make people laugh, like her idol Lucille Ball, star of the sitcom “I Love Lucy.” Barbara leaves Blackpool for London, gets a job in the cosmetics department of a fashion department store and tries to break into television. And thanks to a chance meeting with an acting agent, she first gets a new name, and then a chance to play the leading female role in a new comedy series being launched on the BBC...