What begins as a flu epidemic rapidly transmutes into a national catastrophe; but in the first days there’s little panic.

Anya, the story’s narrator, 36-years old, was married three years before the events and now resides with her husband Sergei and her teenage son Misha in their country house outside of Moscow. They remain oblivious to the scope of the danger until the authorities send out troops to close down the major cities for entry, dooming their inhabitants to a swift yet painful death. Panic triggers violence, looting and devastation. Anya and Sergei have both left family members behind in Moscow, and while Sergei succeeds in rescuing his ex-wife with their 3-year old son, Anya’s mother gets infected and dies in the city under siege. Anya’s father arrives just prior to the appearance of the first looters in the settlement, a direct warning to the family.

They choose to flee to a shabby getaway house at the Vongozero lake near the Finnish border, where Sergei had stayed a few times on hunting trips. Born out of necessity, the expedition grows into eight adults and three children in four crossovers, loaded with belongings and fuel. Mortal danger draws together this weird and ill-assorted group of fellow travelers, speeding to the north of the rapidly deteriorating country.

Scheduled as a 48-hour journey, the road trip turns into twelve days of nightmare, dreary anticipation of grief, worry, and struggle. As this highway trip escalates into a test of ultimate survival, the fellow travelers have to find the strength and resources not only to fight against the looming external dangers, but to face the deepest corners of themselves. There are no guarantees, no rules, and no truths outside those that help them to survive.

The road challenges the limits of human nature, measuring compassion against the thirst for living, the strength of family ties against jealousy and exasperation — and forces each traveler to pay the utmost cost for survival. The sweeping avalanche of a road story stops short at the destination point: a tiny shelter on the shore of the ice-covered Vongozero lake in the freezing taiga forest.

The protagonists now have time to weep for those who failed to reach the final point and to attempt to build out of the ruins and rubble a new routine, a new code, a new life, and possibly new selves.

As horrifying as one’s worst nightmares, the novel reads as a very plausible scenario. Yana Vagner demonstrates outstanding writing skills and deep psychological insight as she sets out the simplest and at the same time the most complicated question before her characters and readers: what does it take to remain human in the face of mortal danger?