★ Shortlisted for the Russian "Big Book Award"! Longlisted for the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award!
★ The story unfolds through the second-person narration of a 6-year-old boy; the reader is addressed as his friend Mila, led by "you" throughout.
★ Fairy-tale tone · Suspenseful case · Soviet vibe – a "Forest Secret Room" read in one sitting, realizing only after closing the book that the most frightening thing is the child's innocent voice.
★ Detective, thriller, fantasy, social novel, and childhood memories are blended into the narrative, using the child's chaotic telling to probe collective unconsciousness and sealed history.
★ Author Alexander Gonorovsky, writer and award-winning screenwriter, whose works have been nominated for the "Golden Globe," "Nika Award," "Golden Eagle Award," represented Russia at the Oscars with the film "The Edge," and won the top prize in the "Horizons" section of the Venice Film Festival!

Summer 1961, in an anonymous factory town, a little girl goes missing. The setting is this nameless town: a few rows of dormitories, a grocery store, the factory, abandoned trenches, "Hydra" Lake, and that forest even dogs avoid. Six-year-old Varka takes his newly arrived friend Mila into the "Dog Forest," which locals dare not enter, to search for her. Instead, they first encounter a three-story tall woven doll, and this is just the first piece of chain puzzle. While adults blame wild beasts, the children are convinced a cloth doll kidnapped the girl. Deep in the forest, the doll "Gretel" can absorb and replay the most terrifying memories, signals only children can receive.
The book uses the second-person voice of a 6-year-old boy; the reader is addressed as Mila, led by "you" throughout. The seemingly innocent child's voice stitches together illusions, games, and reality, making reading like defusing a bomb: with every page turn, the fuse shortens. The missing person case, an old noble mad princess, factory waste, post-war trauma, family scandals... layers of undercurrents grow colder under the filter of the child's voice. Detective, thriller, fantasy, social novel, and childhood memories are blended into the narrative, using the child's chaotic telling to probe collective unconsciousness and sealed history. The ending leaves a blank negative for the reader to develop the truth themselves.

**[Author] Alexander Gonorovsky**
Writer and award-winning screenwriter, whose works have been nominated for the "Golden Globe," "Nika Award," "Golden Eagle Award," represented Russia at the Oscars with the film "The Edge," and won the top prize in the "Horizons" section of the Venice Film Festival.
Gonorovsky was born in 1961 in Ramenskoye, Moscow Oblast, and graduated from the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys and the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). He is the author of "The Book of Hong Tong," "The Russian Magician," "The Doll Forest," etc.; screenwriting works include "Lunar Pioneer," "The Railway," "The Edge," "Five to Seven," "Troy," "Cerberus," etc. In 2016, he won first prize in the Dmitry Gorchev competition for his short story "The Happiness of Suyumchi." His stories have been published in magazines such as "Novy Mir," "New Wave," "Film Script," "Film Art," and he hosts a personal screenwriting workshop. In 2024, he published the co-authored novel "Cerberus."