Тут недалеко

The novel is a fast, comic, frightening road story about Eva, or Evdokia Vinohodova, and her old friend Nika. It begins with Eva already on the run. She has fled Rostov-on-Don after the security services pressure her to become an informer against people she knows from anarchist circles. She had been present around a political action involving a smoke bomb, but the authorities inflate this into a terrorism case. Panicking, Eva takes a few things and starts hitchhiking.

At first she is alone, sunburned and desperate on the roadside between Rostov and Belaya Kalitva. A man named Matvey Ivanovich gives her a lift and lets her stay at his house after she invents a story about being an archaeology student going to excavations. His wife is suspicious, but they feed her and give her a bed. Eva drinks too much homemade wine and begins to feel safe, until Matvey’s son appears and seems to understand that her story does not add up. When a chained dog named Naida nearly attacks her and alerts the household, Eva bolts over fences and runs into the night.

She reaches Moscow with another driver, Mikhail, and despite trying to stay hidden, she cannot resist going to look at the house where she once lived with her friend Nika. Years earlier, Eva and Nika were inseparable: Nika was rich, confident, Moscow-born, and had given Eva a place to live while they studied. Eva, who came from Rostov, admired and envied her. Their friendship ended ten years before the novel begins, after the death of a young man named Andrei, around whom much of Eva’s guilt revolves. Eva has not seen Nika since.