Everything Is Normal: The Life and Times of a Soviet Kid

Everything is Normal is a light-hearted worm’s-eye-view of the USSR through one middle-class Soviet childhood in the 1970s to 1980s, seen through the eyes of a nerdy boy. A relatable journey into the world of the late-days Soviet Union, Everything is Normal is both memoir and social history — a reflection on the mundane deprivations and existential terrors of day-to-day life in Leningrad in the decades preceding the collapse of the USSR.

Sergey Grechishkin’s world is strikingly different, largely unknown and fascinatingly unusual. A world that readers, who grew up in the United States or Europe during the same period will partly recognize. It is a tale of friendship, school, and of growing up — reading Everything is Normal is visiting the very foreign world of life behind the Iron Curtain, but also to journey back into a shared common past.