This book saw the light in 1993, but then went unnoticed. And only many years later, in 2010, after the re-release, it was called by critics a “lost masterpiece”.
The life of university mathematics teacher Tony Hastings is reliably protected by an established life and a professorship, but situations that can break through this armor are absolutely not provided. But one day, misfortune happens, from the category of those that look like a bad dream — a gang attack, violence, the victim of which is Tony himself and his relatives — his wife and daughter. And the worst thing is that in front of someone else’s aggression, an armchair scientist, a smart, intelligent person turns out to be completely helpless. “Will the bandits attack me? Would I be able to protect my family?” Susan Morrow asks herself this question while reading about Tony Hastings (as it turns out, Tony and Susan is a novel within a novel). Susan’s ex-husband, a failed writer, suddenly sent her a work that «finally worked out.» Susan reluctantly opens the first chapter, and the story involuntarily captures her. While reading, she increasingly compares her sorrows and anxieties with Tony’s experiences, analyzes, remembers …
The novel so accurately describes the fears and insecurities of sensitive people, prone to introspection, that it literally forces the reader, like Susan, to try on these plots for themselves and, in addition to the desire to ask themselves questions that are difficult to find an answer to. Surprisingly, this book was first published back in 1993 and remained unnoticed by anyone, and reprinted in 2010, was unanimously called by literary critics a “lost masterpiece”.
Translation from English by Dmitry Kharitonov Corpus, 512 p.