Saint Petersburg, 1900. Eighteen-year-old Vasilij “Baz” Kozlov is about to depart for Paris, ready to challenge England, France and Germany with his regiment in a tennis match: for nearly a century now, international disputes have been settled not by wars but by sporting tournaments. At Berlin station, however, Cécile enters the scene—the fiancée of a French officer with whom our hero will have to cross rackets… That match will bend the arc of his destiny, taking him to America, where he will become a husband and a father (not quite in that order) and encounter gangsters, spies, dancers, politicians, vaudeville actors, snake-oil salesmen, astrophysicists, silent film stars, escapologists and convicts: a teeming cast of vividly colorful characters inhabiting a world slightly different from our own. For the armistice has fostered exchanges between nations, accelerating progress, so that the early twentieth century resembles a novel by Jules Verne more than the one found in history books. But will peace truly be everlasting? A coming-of-age tale that turns into a war story, a sea narrative as well as an on-the-road novel and a prison diary, a spy story and a post-apocalyptic adventure: Leonardo Colombati serves up generous helpings of Love and Death in a sweeping, all-encompassing novel where fictional characters coexist with real-life figures such as Isadora Duncan and Charlie Chaplin, Harry Houdini and Kaiser Wilhelm, all in the service of Baz Kozlov, the survivor. To the very end, he strives to oppose the course of events with his stubborn faith in the goodness of the human soul, hoping, at the close of his odyssey, to find the one person who can truly save him.