“A Sharp Knife for a Soft Heart” is a tango novel: about love-passion and love-possession, about jealousy leading to murder. The love arc spans half the world - from a dance floor somewhere in Russia to a bar in Latin America. This is an adventure novel: a Russian girl marries a Latin man, and their handsome son disappears from the Indians in the Amazon. Seduced and abandoned, in love and lost each other, the heroes of the parable novel find their death on the threshold of immortality, because man is part of another world. Maria Rybakova (b. 1973) is the author of the novels “Anna Grom and Her Ghost” and “The Brotherhood of the Losers,” and the collections of stories “The Secret” and “Blind Speech.” Her prose has been translated into German, French, Spanish and English. “A Sharp Knife for a Soft Heart” is the writer’s third novel.