World apocalyptic bestseller. Artyom lives with his foster father in the intricate labyrinth of the Moscow metro, the only place in the world where humanity is able to survive at least partially after a nuclear war. Individual human communities live in the subway shafts, where each station is a special community, a kind of microstate with all its virtues and vices that we know from everyday life on the surface of the earth. Art'om is in a station that is considered one of the safe places in a huge network of tunnels, but this security is disturbed by a dark power that threatens to destroy not only the boy's refuge, but the entire subway. A young man, who once broke one of the basic commandments of life in the subway, is forced to wander from one station to another, to walk through the entire Moscow subway to the last station, where preachers live in an ideal social setting. They allegedly own a mysterious object that Artyom must acquire in order to save the metro from destruction that threatens not only from within the underground microworld, but also penetrates here from the surface in the form of dark forces... The author received the prestigious European ESFS Awards Eurocon 2007 prize for this novel is referred to as the literary Nobel prize for science fiction), as the best literary debut for 2007. The novel also became the model for a successful computer game.