Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is a world celebrity, winner of the Goncourt Prize and many other awards. His novel Oscar and the Pink Lady was named by readers as the book that changed their lives, along with the Bible, The Little Prince and The Three Musketeers. His novels have been translated into 45 languages and have a total circulation of half a million copies in France every year. The Gates of Heaven is the second volume of Schmitt's grandiose philosophical and romantic saga, The Path Through the Ages. In the first volume of “Paradise Lost,” the immortal healer Noam survived the global flood, and in the future he will see Ancient Egypt, the Renaissance, and the industrial revolution, but in the meantime, in search of his immortal beloved—the incredible Nura, the only one for all millennia—he comes to Mesopotamia, where humanity invented a way of living together that has survived to this day. Large cities instead of small villages; the taming of rivers and irrigation instead of the delicate and humble worship of Nature; the invention of astronomy and writing - before the eyes of the eternal wanderer, the very progress for which humanity has been sacrificing itself since the beginning of its history is happening. And the crown of this progress is the Tower to heaven, to the very abode of the gods, which is erected by slaves by order of King Nimrod. The healer enters any home - to slaves and to Queen Kubaba, to the court astrologer and to the shepherd Abram - and the dizzying era from which humanity has inherited so much opens before us in all its details. For the first time in Russian!