This is an automatically translated description

He is young and mostly alone. Behind him is the wasteland of a not-so-happy childhood and the painful loss of the only person who gave him a sense of comfort and security. Therefore, he looks back to the past often, but with a mixture of nostalgia and pain. His present is mundane and colourless, made up of casual conversations over a bottle of beer, meetings that leave more questions than answers, and a deafening but almost tangible despair. His adult life is not what he had imagined as a child, it presses and drives him on, forcing him to make difficult choices every day. He is stunned and bewildered, he is not just at a crossroads, it seems that he is not sure whether to go on at all."

The Dead, the debut collection of short fiction by Oleksandr Kharchuk, is certainly one of the most distinctive voices of the young Ukrainian literary generation that is only now beginning its journey, at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century.