The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

In a crumbling apartment building in post-Soviet Russia, there s a ghost who won t keep quiet.

Mircha fell from the roof and was never properly buried, so he sticks around to heckle the living: his wife, Azade; Olga, a disillusioned translator/censor for a military newspaper; Yuri, an army veteran who always wears an aviator s helmet; and Tanya, a student of hope, words, and color.

Tanya carries a notebook wherever she goes, recording her dreams of finding love and escaping her job at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum, a place that holds a fantastic and terrible collection of art knockoffs created with the materials at hand, from foam to chewing gum, Popsicle sticks to tomato juice. When the museum s director hears of an American group seeking to fund art in Russia, it looks as if Tanya might get her chance at a better life, if she can only convince them of the collection s worth. Enlisting the help of her neighbors, Tanya scrambles to save her dreams, and along the way discovers that love may have been waiting in her own courtyard all along.