Peculiar detective canvas - stolen secret files (the red folder) - is not the golden thread of the narration. In this beautiful book we come across a love-story, characters' diaries, investigators reports, and flashbacks form the main character's past. You cannot read this book by chapters - you read it uninterrupted, swallowing the harmony of narration. Michael Yudson "Circles of the Wind" - Nezavisimaya Gazeta Description: "Birds and Clouds" by Shali Rozhanskaya is an impressive piece of prose with the subtitle "Israeli detective story." The mystery starts when the police find a woman who was badly injured in her own bedroom by an unknown intruder. Quickly enough it becomes clear to the investigators that the criminals didn't mean to hurt the woman but were aiming for something else. Meantime in one of the secret departments of a research institute the scientists cannot find a red folder with top secret papers. The lost folder, the injured woman - seem like quite a usual beginning for a detective story. But "Birds and Clouds" is much more than a mysterious thriller. As the plot unravels we come across different characters telling their stories in different voices and with their own unique intonation. There's no author's narrative in the text. Each chapter is a piece of one of the character's life written by himself. We turn over a page and see a part of one of the investigator's diary, turn another and learn how the life of one of the intruders unfolded. The characters' destinies are strangely tangled in their past. Some of them met many years before and were dreaming about each other at nights, others never expected themselves to become what they are now. The story starts at the beautiful villa in an Israel town at the Mediterranean coast and brings us back into the cold winter in one of the Soviet villages. There we meet Sasha - a poor girl living with her alcoholic boyfriend who beats her and throws outside their home. That pushed her into the hands of a KGB recruiter. Her mission is to get into the Zionist youth organization which leads her from the USSR to Israel. Leaving Sasha with her newborn son the author gives a new insight - a retired sea captain who is now investigating the kidnapping of the red folder. Many years ago long he met a girl at the rabbi's house and never stopped thinking of her. Now he recognizes her in the victim connected to the disappeared folder. The mystics of the story become more and more intriguing when we meet Hanna - that very injured woman. From the early childhood she found herself in between the two lives she lived - a life of an ordinary Israeli girl and someone form the remote USSR. The polyphony of the narrative catches attention form the first chapter to the end of the book. The profound psychological portraits of the characters make each story a grasping novel and a portrait of the generation. The generation of the Israeli pioneers who managed to flee the USSR and to build a little country with great mystery in its heart.