A dilapidated villa in Rome, an enigmatic Dottoressa, a man on the couch tells about his life: In her new novel 'Golden Sands', Katerina Poladjan combines splinters of old Europe into a cheerful, melancholic picture of the present A holiday resort is being built on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast in the 1950s: Golden Sands, planned as a place in the sun for everyone. Eli is conceived on the construction site. Sixty years later, he has long since celebrated his greatest successes as a film director and is lying on the couch of his Dottoressa in Rome. He conjectures and fabricates his family history, which leads through an entire century and across the European continent, from Odessa to Constantinople and Varna in Bulgaria to Rome.