THE COMMON COLD

There is no cure for the common cold. You drink something hot, complain, and wait eight days. On Christmas Eve in Paris, eighteen-year-old Elya Statsky leaves the guarded home of her exiled Russian family and descends to a row of blue tents beside the Seine. There she meets Gleb-a penniless wanderer with a battered face, no papers, and an unsettling way of speaking about freedom, death, and love. By morning, Elya is determined to abandon the Sorbonne and follow him anywhere. Her father is equally determined to discover what the stranger wants. But Gleb's rags conceal a past none of them could have imagined-and a grief from which he has been walking away for years. Tender, philosophical, and sharply funny, The Common Cold is a novel about wealth and homelessness, exile and belonging, the stories people build to survive, and the unexpected encounters that can redirect an entire life.