This is a story about the battle for a hospital building in Grozny (Chechnya) in January 1995 between Russian Army forces and Chechen rebels supported by Arabian mujahideen and international mercenaries. Although the story is fictional, most of the characters are based on real-life prototypes and events are the compilation of true events during the Grozny Siege in the First Chechen War.
Young Chechnya war veteran alienates himself from his friends and family because of his burned face. When he has to help find his war-time friend, he manages to get back to life again.
The famous scientist, academician and art critic Andrei Ilyin, who survived with the Hermitage staff the harsh trials of the Leningrad blockade, returned to his hometown after many years. The whole life of Ilyin is connected with Leningrad. A life that in the distant years of World War II would have seemed to have no future, but which, despite the unbearable horror of hunger and devastation, continued only in the name of the future ...
Andrey Kulikov goes to Paris to visit the grave of his great-grandfather, Andrey Dolmatov, who had been an officer in the White Army during the Russian Revolution. On the headstone of the grave next to his great-grandfather's, he notices the face of a young woman. Later, while walking through Paris, Andrey sees a woman, Vera, who looks just like the young woman he had seen on the headstone. And so begins the telling of two love stories, separated by three generations and one hundred years.
Indochina, 1945. While the French are harassed by both the Japanese army and the Vietnamese rebels, private Robert Tassen, driven by the memory of a tragedy of which he is the only survivor, embarks on the search for the mysterious and cruel Võ Bình Yên, one of the leaders of the insurrection…