About the book: 2016 / Russian citizen, adventurer and projector Ivan Anxiety, who planned to found the Ophir kingdom on the island of Borneo, was placed in the Strait House by order of Catherine II . There he teaches the starling human speech. Soon Alarm manages to transport the bird to Moscow, to the mysterious cleft of time, located in the famous Golosovo ravine. Individual people and entire military units disappeared there for many years, and then, after tens and even hundreds of years, reappeared. The Chief Secretary of the Secret Expedition, Stepan Ivanovich Sheshkovsky, sends to catch a starling screaming insolence. The investigators enter Golosov Ravine and disappear there for more than two hundred years. They appear in Moscow only in the spring of 2014...Boris Evseev’s book includes ten new stories and a short action-packed novel, the parable “The Starling of Ophir,” which was published in the magazine “Yunost” (2015, Nos. 1–3), and became a finalist for the “Clear” award Polyana" and laureate of the V. Kataev Prize.