Looking back across twenty-five years, a narrator remembers the summer when, at twelve years old, the familiar landscape surrounding Lake Baikal, opening up into something eerie.

The natural world becomes charged with legend: mountains, water and forest seem to possess their own laws, while the mysterious Sarma draws the boy into a realm where wonder and danger are difficult to separate.  Borodin treats childhood not as innocence preserved under glass but as a period in which reality remains unstable enough to admit terror, ecstasy and transformation. The book moves between folktale, spiritual fable and coming-of-age novel, placing its young narrator between the rational Soviet world and an older Siberian landscape dense with memory and myth. Its illustrations by Robert Littleford deepen this quality, making the novel feel slightly recovered from a dream rather than conventionally narrated.

Originally written in Russian as God chuda i pechali, the book first appeared outside the Soviet Union through the dissident publishing networks that carried prohibited manuscripts abroad and then smuggled them back into circulation. Borodin himself was repeatedly imprisoned for anti-Soviet activity, though this is less a political prison narrative than an oblique, lyrical defence of inner freedom—the imagination as one territory the state cannot quite administer.

Quartet Books, 1988 first British paperback edition. Translated from the Russian by Jennifer Bradshaw; illustrated by Robert Littleford. Moderate cover rubbing, marking and edge wear; internally clean and sound.