"The Gall Angel" by Katya Kachur, summary Automatic translate

"The Gallbladder Angel" is a philosophical drama with elements of magical realism set in 2025, published by Eksmo. Katya Kachur created a text in which the mystical plot of the Angel of Death and the modern story of a Moscow writer who has lost the gift of words unfold in parallel — and are inexorably drawn together. The novel reads like magical realism with a painstakingly constructed everyday backdrop: hospital corridors, Moscow traffic jams, diet cutlets, and a jewelry workshop in a "house on chicken legs" coexist with otherworldly gardens and Trees of God.

During a routine operation, a surgeon removes a stone from a patient’s gallbladder, which turns out to be a real diamond with a frozen figure of an angel inside.

At the end of 2025, the novel won the annual Readers’ Choice award on the LiveLib portal. It confidently outperformed its competitors in the Russian Prose category.

Preface: A Deal in the Desert

The wind from Azrael’s wing spreads a tornado across the Sahara. Old Adam, the finest jeweler in the East, dies in a torn tent. His wife, Aisha, departs, leaving her husband alone with the Angel of Death. Azrael appears beautiful: silver curls, emerald eyes, wings with ruby vessels — and Adam, instead of horror, sees perfection before him. To the sinner, who can love a diamond and a woman with equal fervor, the Angel explains: the righteous see his beauty, while sinners see hundreds of eyes and thousands of tongues on their fans.

Adam proposes a deal: he will imprint Azrael’s image in a diamond, and the Angel will extend his life by ten years. Azrael refuses — why would an immortal be trapped in a stone? But Adam counters: people only see the Angel in death, and through the stone, he will be able to control their desires in life. While the Angel laughs and cries out to God, a drop of bile from the dagger falls onto Adam’s tongue, and the old man dies quietly. Azrael shakes the remains of the tent from his wings and grins: "Controlling their desires in life… that would be interesting."

Sergey Grekov and the Lost Gift

Forty-year-old Sergei Petrovich Grekov emerges from anesthesia in the surgical ward. Since birth, he’s been burdened with a plethora of gastrointestinal ailments — ten thick medical records compared to the single, skinny one of his classmate Vasya Zhukov, all labeled "ARI." Grekov’s mother lived with these records her entire life, like volumes of War and Peace. Now, surgeon Vadim Kazachenko has removed his gallbladder — a laparoscopic procedure that takes thirty-two minutes and four incisions into his abdomen.

The problem is different. Immediately after the operation, Kazachenko is acting strange: he’s fawning, asking ridiculous questions — has the patient lost anything, has he had surgery before? Grekov doesn’t understand. He’s a famous writer, the author of the acclaimed novel "Cut Off the Shadow," and the anesthesia is still making his head spin.

In fact, Kazachenko is shocked by what he discovered inside his gallbladder. As the yellow-green bile flowed from the stone, its facets glinted under the surgical light. The stone, apparently from the writer’s body, turned out to be a faceted crystal — transparent, with light-refracting facets. Vadim considers all possible explanations: swallowed, it would have passed through the intestines; inhaled, it would have lodged in the lungs. Grekov’s ultrasound had noted the stone since childhood, and it had always been the same size as the crystal. Kazachenko takes this secret home, suffers from insomnia for two days, surfs the internet, and comes to no conclusions.

Grekov is discharged on the second day. He is picked up by Mira Thor, a friend since first grade. Plump, loud-voiced, with jewelry the size of a fist, she commutes from Rublyovka to the VDNKh area so she can be near Gray at all times. Mira is a tarot reader with a clientele of ministers and members of parliament. She has loved him unrequitedly since he was seven, and has long since resigned herself to the fact that this love will forever remain unrequited. In the car, she reminds him that before the surgery, the cards showed the loss of something "life-forming," not an organ. Grekov dismisses this.

A white cat, Julie, waits at home. For years, while Grekov writes, his fingers glow with a warm yellow light — and Julie sits next to him, motionless, like an Egyptian statuette, watching his master’s hands with anxious rapture. He never told Mira or anyone else about this. The cat knew: it wasn’t the writer himself who created the light in his fingers.

After the operation, the glow is gone. Grekov sits down to write a novel — the text falters, the epithets are banal, Azrael’s dialogue with the coffee merchant comes out "clumsy, like a laudatory report to the director of a felt factory." Julie stops sitting at her writing desk. Kvakila the crow, who for years brought Julie glittering finds to the balcony — from silver spoons with noble coats of arms to foreign coins — now looks on mockingly. Mira lays out her cards and sees emptiness: "You don’t exist. The universe doesn’t see you."

Grekov starts drinking. He starts making friends from school and college, his money is slipping away, his editor Valya calls every week — the contract requires a new book every nine months — and his bank account is dwindling. Mira is frightened: "You’re becoming one of many."

Kazachenko, the crystal, and the "chicken house"

Vadim carries the crystal in his pocket for two weeks. A chance encounter suggests a solution: in the elevator, he meets his neighbor, Margarita, a psychologist with a dimple and a scar above her eyebrow from a childhood swing. She invites him to a meeting at the "chicken house" — a two-story wooden structure clad in silver siding among Stalin-era buildings and high-rises, which consistently survives despite the city council’s promises to demolish it for a parking lot.

On the second floor of the house are three offices: Mira Thor, the Karat jewelry workshop, and a psychologist’s office. Kazachenko goes to the jeweler — an elderly craftsman with binoculars — and shows him a crystal.

So all the threads converge at one point: Vadim Kazachenko, the surgeon who removed the crystal; Mira Thor, Grekov’s friend who predicted the loss; Margarita, the psychologist with whom Kazachenko is increasingly attracted. And the crystal from the writer’s gallbladder lies on the jeweler’s counter.

Azrael and his garden

Parallel to the events in Moscow, Azrael’s story unfolds. The angel walks through his domain — a gigantic garden with tents for various categories of the dead. Sinners, murderers, and rapists languish in a transparent tent, where a focused light burns out their eyes. The righteous, the innocently murdered, those killed in war, those who perished from love — each in his own tent, and each sees Azrael differently, though his appearance has remained unchanged for millennia.

Separately, there’s a "baby" tent for children under three. The babies see the Angel and laugh: the bell-like laughter heals the wounds of the other garden inhabitants, and the birds carry it over the treetops. Among the little ones is thin, bald Vasya, an orphan with new teeth, who arrived here only recently. Vasya immediately climbs onto Azrael’s lap, kisses his cheeks and nose, and asks to be taken with him. The Angel is at a loss: for millennia, he’s worked alone, and for the first time, something living is growing in his heart.

Gradually, the attachment grows stronger. Azrael takes Vasya with him to the Trees of God — the Raven and the Dove. On the first, leaves turn yellow, bearing the names of those who must be taken from Earth; on the second, sprouts are emerging — a sign of those whose time it is time to return to life. Vasya watches as a leaf on the Raven branch wrinkles and browns, until the veins form a name. News of the child on the Master’s shoulder spreads throughout the garden: peacocks spread their tails, eagles take flight, tigers emerge from the thicket — the End of Azrael’s Total Solitude is announced by all creatures at once.

The Diaries of Masha Perlova

Parallel to Grekov’s creative crisis, a historical thread emerges in the text: the writer reads Masha Perlova’s old diaries, dated 1916–1917. The young woman is in love with Nikolenka, a spoiled, handsome man who is putting off his wedding. With the onset of the October Revolution, the entries become more troubling: there’s a shooting on Myasnitskaya Street, the pharmacy is ransacked, the Filippovskaya Bakery on Tverskaya Street is looted, and the Bolsheviks have occupied the Post Office. Masha is pregnant, hiding her belly from her parents, and her mother sews diamonds into the hem of her dress. Among the stones picked out of the family jewelry, one great-grandmother, Elizaveta, spotted an Angel — "as if alive." The family prepares to flee, and Nikolenka promises to marry in France. Grekov, reading these pages while on IV drips in the hospital, worries more about Masha than about his own romance — and it is through her handwriting that he begins to tap into the lost nerve of writing. ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws