Everything is Normal offers a lighthearted worm’s-eye-view of the USSR through the middle-class Soviet childhood of Sergey Grechishkin in the 1970s and ’80s. A relatable journey into the world of the late-days Soviet Union, this book is both a memoir and a social history lesson — 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. A tale of friendship, school, and growing up, to read Everything is Normal is to discover the very foreign way of life behind the Iron Curtain, but also to journey back into a shared past.

Sergey’s world is strikingly different, largely unknown, and fascinatingly unusual, and yet a world that readers who grew up in the United States or Europe during the same period will partly recognize. As Sergey’s world falls apart, his defiant love of Western pop culture eventually overcomes the bleakness of his upbringing.

Upon first glance at the cover design, a faded black and white photograph of an innocent Sergey smiles back at the reader - a familiar style of photograph seen in households across the Western world. Shortly afterwards, the object within his hands, a Kalashnikov rifle as tall as Sergey himself, becomes glaringly obvious. Superimposed by our cover cooks, the cover design stages Sergey to appear at total ease while holding the rifle, as if 'everything is normal'. The title and author's name, painted in bold Russian red, complete the cover design.