This book by Lado Kilasonia is a collection of stories, but even more fragments of one entire narrative, novel-like episodes. As the title suggests, these are stories of Tbilisi’s ‘Golden Quarter’ district, and in them the characters and stories are probably real. They recur from story to story and tell a continuous narrative, one general history, one life – as lived on the streets, in a human way, over the years, divided into death and life. There is plenty of aggression in the book, but this is not the controlling element, but a different sort of force, which may turn out to be even greater, if a man shows this force in his own person and then passes it on to others. The times, however, give rise to injustice and evil, which the author calls the ‘time of fatherlessness’. The heroes of the story give the same name to the grey 1990s, when Lado and lads of his generation were children. When a boy most needs a father is the time when their fathers are fighting in the civil war, or in Abkhazia, or in South Ossetia, if they haven’t fled abroad to earn money, or aren’t on drugs, or in prison. The stories told in this books begin in the past, when impressions were most acute, in childhood. Such a hero as Maro Bebo (The Kerosene Fairytale) is at the same time evil and good. So are the other characters who, when they cannot find goodness in man’s world, establish a connection with creatures of nature. But in the end, the book’s overall atmosphere is ‘Bronx and the Golden Quarter’, or stories about lads, both good and bad – material for a film, if any director would like to concoct an appealing blockbuster about the unbearable lightness of the 1990s…