Their focus is Magadan a town in the Northern Far East of Russia and the unvisited lives of its inhabitants and emigrants schoolchildren doctors teachers mothers daughters. Some characters span several stories. Some of their stories span decades and continents. The measure of their telling though is invariably the measure of everyday existence. Their dramas too are made of quotidian stuff each life with its own sly or suppressed tragedies and its brief often unexpected ecstasies.

Kseniya Melnik's sensibility is sober and humorous; her stories are moving and funny. In their patient deliberate unfolding at once surprising and convincing and in the fitness of their details vital because they are suggestive we sense above all an assurance that is dazzling.