What is this book about? About American punks and African oil workers. About love and Soviet childhood. What connection could there be between all this? Ask Vadik Goldner, and he will answer you in a mixture of Russian, English and Portuguese. The hero of Alexander Stesin’s new novel has lived several lives: an emigrant schoolboy, a young hardcore punk, a successful lawyer in Angola... “Troy Against the World” is a book about how the experience of the past unexpectedly makes its way into our present. Talking about the hero's growing up on three continents, the author in his own way updates the classic genre of the “novel of education.” The soundtrack here is either sensual Portuguese fado or furious hardcore, which is equally loved in the slums of the Angolan capital and in the provincial American city with a Homeric name. Alexander Stesin - poet, prose writer, traveler and doctor, author of the books “By the Way of Tea” (2017), “New York Detour” (2019), “African Book” (2020), “Birds of Life” (2021) and others, laureate "Russian Prize" (2014) and the literary prize "NOS" (2019).