Murder on Makayonka Street

Minsk, 2022. Oppressive, dark, full of fear — and yet alive, with communities of urban lunatics, cultural ghosts, and forces of resistance. “Murder on Makayonka Street” is a poignant, grotesque novel about the border between reality and dream in Belarus after 2020.

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In the stifling, repressed Minsk of 2022, with empty billboards and full police cars, terrible news has spread around the closed community — the Guild of Urban Madmen: Zhanna Tanzen, a bohemian butterfly and participant in mass demonstrations during the 2020 revolution, was strangled by an infernal mechanism behind the children's railway station. A malevolent force of unknown origin is also attached to another urban legend — the street singer Komarovskaya Primadonna.

Minsk police, busy hunting down politicians, file a mysterious murder in the archives. The Minsk Pismenny clan takes on the case: a dubious rentier and hopeless bachelor Yakub Pismenny, his shrewd adviser Arkady Tabibulaev, and his dead grandmother Khanya Pismennaya, who during her lifetime was the impresario of almost all the city's madmen.