About the book: 2013 / Catherine Love's book "A funny Russian novel" is an attempt to look at Russia from the outside, to look with sympathy and love, to understand how people live today a huge country, how it solves its problems, what it hopes for. Valentina, the main character of the book, wants to write a novel about a former Russian oligarch and goes to Siberia, meets different people, then her traces are lost in the snowy expanses of the mysterious “sixth part of the land.” Valentina's friend Jean comes to St. Petersburg to try to find her and... gets stuck in this beautiful, alien city. The main off-stage character of the novel is Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky. The biography of the disgraced oligarch, according to Lowe, serves as an excellent example of the struggle between Western and Russian principles in the fate of one person. Moreover, at first Love wanted to write about a fictional character, until she realized that there was no need to invent anything: life offered her a much more eloquent image in the person of Khodorkovsky. We are all disconnected, but also connected to each other, we are all trying to understand ourselves and our place in this world, to understand what we want from life, and to evaluate ourselves according to the “Hamburg score”, and, oddly enough, Russia is able to help in this. In France and Switzerland, the book was received with a bang, it was widely discussed in the press and reader circles. One of the critics even wrote that thanks to Lowe’s novel, the Swiss finally got to know Russia better.