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Maxim Gakh, the author of the novel The Fifth Park and a number of short stories that won literary competitions, this time presents a collection of short fiction that is completely atypical for our literary landscape. The author's quiet, balanced, and stylistically polished voice almost never rises to too loud registers, but this does not prevent him from telling a fascinating story about things that are unusual, bizarre, and painfully familiar at the same time.

Quite different in plot and concept, the stories presented in the collection are united by a veiled, often bracketed sense of existential anxiety. It appears through the layers of life circumstances, reminding us that everyday life is just a scenery designed to hide some deep, fundamental secret of existence that is ready to be revealed to us at any moment. While we stubbornly continue our journey through the desert of reality.

The collection of short stories by Maksym Gakh is the best confirmation that after a long stay in the shadow of translated literature, new Ukrainian prose is increasingly asserting itself. The sound register of the stories included in the collection is very diverse: from memories of childhood music lost in the cacophony of adult life to a report on the activities of a company that controls human destinies, from Bradbury's Martian chronicles in a provincial setting that is painfully familiar to domestic readers to Tibetan death demons at the first bell festival.

Despite the conceptual and plot diversity, there is one theme that runs like a red thread through the entire collection - the theme of transition from the familiar "here and now" to the transcendent "there". It is this idea that forms the solid foundation on which, like the terracotta tower from the story of the same name, the carefully constructed structure of this sometimes surprisingly cosy, sometimes anxiety-filled prose rests.