Based on the novel by Booker Prize Winner Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party is set in August 1991. In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he fades from this world. Their reminiscences of the dying man and of their lives in Russia are punctuated by debates and squabbles: Whom did Alik love most? Should he be baptized before he dies, as his alcoholic wife, Nina, desperately wishes, or be reconciled to the faith of his birth by a rabbi who happens to be on hand? And what will be the meaning for them of the Yeltsin putsch, which is happening across the world in their long-lost Moscow but also right before their eyes on CNN?

Two escaped convicts pose as children's summer camp staff in order to evade capture and learn about caring for others in the process. Sumrak has been in prison since he was 16 years old but is pushing thirty now, is well acquainted with prison gang culture and covered with tattoos. Evgeni Koltsov is a former police officer unjustly imprisoned and destined for a death sentence from the other inmates if he stays in prison.

Olga Alexandrovna was an easy-going person. She was beautiful, lively, never wanted much from life but never missed what was coming her way. She was on good terms with everybody: her husband, her son, her lovers… It was only with her daughter Lena that her relationship was complicated. Lialia had a theory that infidelity served to strengthen marriage ties. Once a schoolmate dropped in to see her son. He attracted Lialia’s attention and shortly they became intimate. Their relationship could have gone on and on but once Lialia caught her young lover with her own daughter…

A three newly wedded pairs are traveling to a wonderful exotic island of Cuba and adventures start.

An ethnic Russian villager's wife gives birth to a baby that resembles a Kazakh neighbour.

The heroine, a lonely woman, falls in love with a young businessman very similar to a childhood friend. Everything separates them, the age difference, the social position and this creates a multitude of obstacles, sad or ridiculous, to the realization of their aspirations. But how to imagine that this man, who was trying at the beginning to get rid of an intruder, comes to a declaration of love accompanied by flowers.

A medical instructor Alya Bulanina has become a person, communication with whom revives the soldiers’ faith that they are welcome and loved at home...