Winter triumphant
Ivan is convinced that he is dying. Lying in a hospital bed, he follows his doctor´s advice and begins writing down the story of the previous few months — a story that may explain how he ended up there and why he now hopes not so much to be saved as to be understood.
It begins with the deliberate burning of an old Moscow house. Seven people are killed, dozens are injured, and there are too many signs suggesting that the tragedy was no accident. Ivan´s friend, journalist Alexei Korobov, starts searching for the truth and finds himself confronting people for whom human lives are little more than obstacles standing between them and valuable Moscow real estate.
Yet the investigation gradually becomes only one part of a much larger story. Ivan returns to his childhood, his mother´s illness, poverty, selling newspapers in the Moscow Metro, his first steps into journalism, and the people who taught him both to hate the world and, despite everything, to retain some faith in humanity.
Winter Triumphant is a novel about friendship and betrayal, compassion and beauty, money and power, the price of human dignity, and what may happen to a person when justice remains out of reach for too long.
Winter Triumphant is more than a story of investigative journalism and a confrontation with people who possess money and power. At its centre is the life of a man who learned very early that justice rarely arrives when it is needed most.
Ivan looks back on his mother´s illness, childhood poverty, working in the Moscow Metro as a boy, humiliation, fear, and the rare acts of kindness that prevented him from losing his faith in people completely. Later, journalism becomes both his way into another life and his means of confronting the world that had once treated him so mercilessly.
The novel´s present-day storyline begins with a deadly fire. As the characters investigate the suspected arson, they gradually encounter a system in which property, corruption, influence, and human lives are closely intertwined. Yet as the story develops, the boundary between the innocent and the guilty becomes increasingly difficult to define.
The novel is structured as the confession of a man looking back on his life from what he believes may be its final point. For this reason, the investigative plot is constantly intertwined with reflections on compassion, beauty, hatred, freedom, dignity, and the price of justice.
It is a story about the way old cruelty can remain inside a person for years — and about whether a single memory of kindness, a true friendship, or one attempt to do the right thing can be enough to keep that cruelty from winning.
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