★ A novel about the ripple effects of evil. Over 10,000 copies sold!
★ The monstrous, perverted killers never stop to think that their own relatives are victims too. A coming-of-age story about guilt and the price children pay for a father’s sins.
★ Told through an adolescent’s eyes: when the person closest to you is branded a demon, you are forced to bear the stigma and the trauma, to face society’s gaze and a civil war inside your own skull. With “surgical precision” the author dissects how trauma seeps into every crack of a life: the permanent loss of safety, the flashbacks and nightmares, the numbness, the collapse of order.
★ The boy’s voice—sensitive, chaotic, brutally honest—lets the reader feel the viscous guilt and helpless rage first-hand, dragging each of us into self-interrogation: What would I have done? How would I judge?
★ A psychologically profound, socially corrosive coming-of-age novel. It peels back our reflex reactions to crime (hate the killer, pity the victim) and exposes the murkier human terrain beneath—where victim and bystander blur, innocence and culpability tangle, and survival means learning to breathe while carrying a weight that can never be set down.
★ A bold literary innovation. In a market crowded with killers, cops, and corpses, this book gives the “invisible victims” a voice.
★ For lovers of literary fiction, true-crime devotees, and anyone drawn to the weird, the psychological, the coming-of-age.

For ten years Yegor had lost count of how many times he had dreamed of his father, Kalgaev. That night he dreamed again of the detention center: the room split in two by a glass wall.
“Why did you do that to Andrey and Tanya?” Yegor asked.
Kalgaev answered: “They smelled so good.”
I used to invent legends about my childhood—that I grew up without a father, or that my parents divorced when I was tiny. To everyone I ever told the truth (and there weren’t many) I wanted to shout: I’m innocent! I’m a victim too!

Sixteen-year-old Yegor’s life ends on the day his father is arrested for the rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl.

Until March 2012 he had been happy without knowing it. Then the apartment was searched, the father taken away. Rumours flew—was it a protest? A business feud? A set-up? The truth was worse than anyone could invent: a little girl raped and killed. At first Yegor denies it—“Not him, never”—but memories gnaw their way in. The night before International Women’s Day his father came home late, agitated, half-drunk, though he never drank. Dad worked as a swimming coach; a boy once scalded himself in the showers, and afterwards Dad always went in first to test the water. The boy stopped coming to the pool and then vanished.In the garage of their country cottage, stands a blue racing bike, scratched all over. Every summer the family barbecued there; “he”—Yegor can no longer say “father”—lived at the cottage all season. When black bags are carried out of the garage cellar, the world caves in.

Popular rage, unable to reach the real monster, ricochets onto the family. They spit on his mother, smear excrement on the door. The boy becomes a pariah—loses friends, loses his girlfriend, is beaten, drops out of school. They flee to the back of beyond: mother works as a supermarket cleaner, Yegor attends a bottom-tier school and spends every free minute staring at the bedside carpet as if it were television. How face the fact? How hate the man who gave you life? How live with the terror that one day you might turn into the same beast? He tries to seal himself off—new town, new story, new name, a life rewritten. The past follows like a shadow, forcing him back again and again. The world loads him with innocent guilt; he grows used to the weight, folds the shame into daily routine the way other people sort objects by colour or tug a door-handle eight times before leaving home. Ten years on, Yegor is no wiser, no calmer. Inside him chaos, hatred, no logic. But whom does he hate? The father? Himself?

If you need two words for this book, they are guilt and culpability—the hair-line between them keeps Yegor awake. He killed no one, broke no law; he is innocent—so why does everyone act as if he must pay? With scalpel-sharp precision Anastasiya Maksimova dissects the finest layers of guilt: how it sticks, how it corrodes, how it quietly eats every pleasure—dreamless sleep, the feeling of home, the ability to trust, to touch a child without flinching. Should the relatives of a serial killer share the blame? Did they miss the warning signs? Could they really not have known—or did they choose not to see? How is responsibility divided? Is there such a thing as collective guilt, collective responsibility? And what, if anything, can we do?

We have crawled through the minds of murderers, investigators, victims, bystanders, accomplices; we have gorged on detailed re-enactments of every atrocity. Yet we have ignored the people sucked into the vortex of another’s crimes. Anastasiya Maksimova writes, with brutal honesty, a novel about growing up, about guilt, about children who pay for their fathers’ sins. The book will strip away the protective skin you have grown over the last few years and leave you raw, shouting.

【EXCERPTS】
“I used to invent legends about my childhood—that I grew up without a father, or that my parents divorced when I was tiny. To everyone I ever told the truth (and there weren’t many) I wanted to shout: I’m innocent! I’m a victim too!”

“No one knows when a person will crawl out of that place, understand? Once you fall in, you’re down the rabbit hole, falling farther and farther towards the planet’s core.”

“He regrets that he can’t roll the knowledge back. It moves inside him like a cold, sticky wave until it takes root somewhere in the back of his neck.”

“For ten years Yegor had lost count of how many times he dreamed of Kalgaev. Sometimes, in the dream, his father was never locked up, never charged, nothing happened; he simply walked around the flat, joking, turning the TV up loud. In other dreams he was released, and Yegor felt terror that the man would re-enter their lives; for some reason, in those dreams, he lived with Mother and looked more child than adult.”

“But there is a third kind of dream, the worst. Kalgaev never appears, yet he is everywhere—he rings the doorbell, stands outside the flat, walks the rooms; Yegor cannot see him, but he smells him. A ghost, a predator ready to pounce. With time, Mikhail Kalgaev shows up less often in Yegor’s dreams, yet he never disappears completely.”

“That night he dreamed again of the detention center: the waiting, the search, the room split in two by glass.
‘Why did you do that to Andrey and Tanya?’ Yegor asked.
Kalgaev answered: ‘They smelled so good.’”

【Author】Anastasiya Maksimova (pen-name: Una Hart)
Novelist, literary mentor, bestselling author of YA fantasy. Seven books written and published in four years; finalist of the 2020 “Reader’s Choice” award; nominee for the 2023 “New Horizons” prize; jury member of the “New Children’s Book” competition.
She is the author of When the Dead Sing, Troll Peak, and Tell Me a Story—novels rooted in folklore, fantasy, and historical myth. The theme “the sins of the fathers are visited on the children” is no accident for her. The heartbreaking The Children in My Father’s Garage owes its razor-sharp pacing, suspense, and emotional density to the craft she honed writing genre fiction.