Reminiscent of Black Mirror with a dark metaphysical twist, The Land of Random Numbers is a collection of stories dwelling on the “what if?” question. What if people reincarnated back in time in whole clusters? How about a game of Mafia, but with real murders? What if you could pass the trials of the Last Judgment during your lifetime? What if David Bowie didn’t really die, and Joseph Beuys was not rescued and cared for by Crimean Tatars, but by teenage girls in a suburban summer home? What if you lost the ability to speak after a brain injury, but there was still a conscious and verbal part of your brain that claimed a different personality? What if a new virus emerges, intertwining humans and nature into a global mystical “biotext”? And what do you do if you start hearing voices, where one of them is Stalin, and the other is an incoherent half-mute desperate to communicate?

Zamirovskaya stories unravel in realities similar to ours, albeit with a touch of the fantastic. They evolve from themes of the mundane, bureaucracy, power and family. In this transformed universe, time travel is possible, the world can change in a blink of an eye, familiar historical figures play completely different roles, and an ordinary game can become something much more threatening and sinister than ever imagined.

Tatsiana imbues her personal memories with the dark surrealism of totalitarian-era writing, ghost stories, and children’s folklore, creating spine-chilling, absurd narratives about distorted normativities, in which the surreal takes over and becomes the norm.

Much inspired by metaphysical realism, Tatsiana skillfully intertwines the ideas of quantum theory, neuroscience and biology to explore the nature of things in an attempt to look beyond reality as we know it, to achieve a multi-dimensional perception of the world.

With its poetic language, replete with exquisite metaphors and mesmerizing rhythms, this captivating book lures the reader into the glimmering net of universal existential questions. The Land of Random Numbers is a strikingly humane book about coming of age, violence, language deprivation and broken memory, withholding answers but offering vast spaces for contemplation.