The two narratives included in this book are the works of Russian magic realism. In the first novel, Shadowplay on a Sunless Day, Anatoly Kudryavitsky writes about modern life in Moscow and the life of an immigrant in Germany.

The chapters of this multi-layered novel form a mosaic of episodes in both real and surreal worlds. The writer faces real life with a fantasy world of a shadow world drawing parallel with Tuatha De Danann, the underworld of Celtic mythology.

Spending time there gives heroes an opportunity to look at their existence from the perspective of eternal life, which looks attractive and terrifying. The novel deals with the problems of identity, national identity and crises of the "new Europeans" generation.

In the second novel, A Procession of Mirrors and Contemplation, the author draws his attention to human cloning, an issue that is at the center of the current scientific debate. In this novel, philosophical aspects are seen to create artificial characters lacking feelings and experience the daily life of life through a story about clandestine cloning experiments taking place in an underground laboratory on the outskirts of Moscow.

Most of the cloned animals are found in Grodno, Belarus, a city that has always been, because of its geographical location, an important crossroads in Eastern Europe. Each clone is a special person who does not look for his own identity.

However, only one of them has a chance of success.

I want that book.