The novel by the famous Siberian writer Anatoly Efimovich Zyabrev is based on the fate of his grandfather Alexei Alekseevich, one of those peasants who worked on the construction of the bridge across the Ob and laid the foundation for the village, and then the city of Novonikolaevsk, which later became Novosibirsk. The story "The Boy with with a big heart" tells about the dramatic survival of a teenager in a penal colony, and then about his becoming a soldier, a defender of the Motherland as part of a special combat military unit formed from released prisoners during the Great Patriotic War.