Some of the villagers avoided all activity the entire day; some even longer. Elsbeth once told Martin and me that years earlier, on the day after one of Selma’s dreams, the retired mailman had stopped moving altogether. He was convinced that any movement could mean death; he remained convinced for days, even months after Selma’s dream, long after someone had in fact died in accordance with the dream’s dictate, the shoemaker’s mother. The mailman simply stayed in his chair. His immobile joints became inflamed, his blood became clotted and finally came to a standstill halfway through his body at the very moment that his mistrusted heart stopped beating. The retired mailman lost his life from fear of losing it. With many of Veronesi’s past works drawing heavily on his own life, it’s tempting to look for him in Carrera, his protagonist, but he rejects the comparison: “I don’t reflect myself in Marco Carrera. He is not even a projection of who I might have been … If he were a real person, I would like to be his friend, and, above all, his tennis doubles partner.” The city is brimming with surreal and incredible stories, he adds. “You could go to a funeral and think you’re going to get an interesting story for your writing. You will leave with so many that your publisher will say, ‘Please! Not so much.’ Luanda writes far better than you can write.” Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Just the Plague is not, as its title might suggest, an early mover in the field of “corona-lit”. It refers instead to the little known and potentially disastrous outbreak of plague in Moscow in 1939, which was swiftly thwarted by the secret police. Written as a screenplay in the late 1980s, it was submitted by Ulitskaya, then an unknown, as part of a scriptwriting course application. It was rejected and buried among her discarded papers. “Thirty-two years have passed,” she writes in the epigraph, “and the script has now acquired a new significance.” A whimsical tragicomedy with a stellar ensemble cast, What You Can See From Here is the miraculous story of an unusual village sprinkled with fairytale magic, based on the bestselling book by Mariana Leky.

My mother was still asleep in our apartment above Selma’s. My father was already at his medical office. I was tired. I’d had trouble falling asleep the night before and Selma had stayed at my bedside for a long time. Maybe something in me had sensed what Selma would dream about and so wanted to keep her up. Maybe your father will be the one, I thought, but naturally didn’t say it out loud, because fathers aren’t supposed to die, no matter how bad they are. Martin put me down and exhaled.A phenomenon . . . A warm and curious book . . . its drama sprinkled with matter-of-fact magic . . . [It] uncovers sorrow, humor and companionship, a clear-eyed tonic in troubled times.” The drama unfolds in a remote village, and the protagonist is a middle-aged woman, Selma, who has a special gift: she can foresee death. Each time an okapi appears in her dreams, a person in the village dies in the days that follow. Selma lives together with her granddaughter Luise, who has been hiding herself away since the untimely death of her childhood friend. It's only when a Buddhist monk comes to the village that she finds a way out of her grief and gives the power of love a chance. The film is also a portrait of rural life, a village and its unusual inhabitants. international title:

Born in 1943, Ultiskaya grew up in Moscow, the daughter of Jewish parents, and entered the workforce in the 1960s as a geneticist, before a run-in with the KGB closed the lab where she worked. This episode was later fictionalised in her novel Big Green Tent, one of many novels, plays and short stories that depict the lives of private individuals getting by within the Soviet machine. Through these works – notably Sonechka, Medea and Her Children, The Kukotsky Enigma, Daniel Stein, Interpreter and Jacob’s Ladder – she has amassed numerous literary awards, including Russia’s most prestigious book prizes, France’s Prix Medicis and a nomination for the Man Booker international prize. In 2020, Ulitskaya had the same odds (6/1) as Margaret Atwood and Maryse Condé to win the Nobel. A] whimsical love story . . . peopled by eccentric-but-endearing characters . . . There is enough candor and humor, along with a handful of bracingly moody characters, to make Leky's vision of perpetual love compelling."

But Veronesi and Carrera do share a similar concern about the future of western society. In the penultimate chapter, Carrera rails against the tyranny of individualism and laments that rationality, compassion and generosity are fading away; all of which is undermining our societal structures and putting the world in “great danger”. “The word freedom itself has become an ‘open sesame’ to the lowest forms of selfishness and social dysfunctionality,” Veronesi says. I have always been fascinated with okapis because they look like made-up animals, or creatures assembled in a drunken stupor,” says 48-year-old Leky, speaking from her flat in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg. “This novel was similar: I wanted to bring together parts that didn’t necessarily feel like they belonged together.”