It’s wintertime. Philip, the protagonist in the story, slowly finds his way through the thick mountain woods to a small village, and, eventually, to his grandfather’s abandoned house. Someone is chasing him. Once in the house, he finds a dead man who conspicuously looks like Philip himself. Taking this as a sinister warning, Philip spends a nerve-racking night in the empty house.
Recollecting the events from a year ago, Philip traces back the way that has lead him here. At that time, he is photographer for a minor daily newspaper, divorced, living all by himself, and haunted by the futile ambition to become a ‘real’ investigative journalist. One day he is sent to cover an alleged suicide in a metro station. The victim is a young girl, presumably a university student, called Julia C. Philp, however, gets there too late: the metro station is cordoned off and the body already removed, with no trace whatsoever. The same night he is visited by another girl, Nina, introducing herself as Julia’s sister.
Failed photo reporter starts to investigate the suicide of a young woman in a metro station, as to gradually discover, that facts don’t fit the truth. Involved in the vague scheme of her death, some will pay with their identity, others – with their life. However, Julia C. is not dead. And she’s not alive, either.
Elena Alexieva was born in 1975 in Sofia. She majored in International Economic Relations at the University of National and World Economics in Sofia, and continued her studies in the Doctoral Program in Semiotics at New Bulgarian University, Sofia. She is the author of two poetry books, Ladder on the Heart (1994) and Face of Killer Angel (1996), one novel – The Blue Stairway (2000), and two collections of short stories, Readers’ Group 31 (2005) and Who (2006). Her works have appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including Voices from the Faultline: A Balkan Anthology (2002).
She is the winner of the 2006 Helikon Prize for new Bulgarian fiction for her book Readers’ Group 31. Her latest book is the novel The Knight, the Devil and Death (2007, Colibri). Elena Alexieva lives in Sofia where she works as freelance translator, interpreter, and writer.
* The website www.colibri.bg is optimized 
