A treasure-house of myth and narrative exuberance in a cycle of short stories imbued with a sense of the transitory. Deprived of a sense of the past, the motley Russian dwellers of a settlement-town - war cripples, bereaved wives, madmen and magicians - inhabit a dislocated world. Death is all around them, yet their lives are animates with vitality and humour, and with a peculiarly Russian sense of the miraculous in a prose style by turns baroque, magic realist and savagely terse.