Since Maidan in Kyiv and Russian presence in the Crimea, Ukraine has never been the same. In 2014, the country is deeply divided by the conflict imposed on the Ukrainians. But since nobody actually asked the nation, author Oleksandr Shyshko decided to take matters into his own hands and look for the answer to the ultimate question - who are the Ukrainians and what do they want.Shyshko spent his time researching the national identity of native Ukrainians, and as he went he stumbled on a discov...

Having spent years in a coma, a female protagonist is anxious to lead a normal life. Her miraculous recovery is riddled with falling in and out of our time continuum - she wanders through history in her imagination as if it were her backyard. Notwithstanding her condition, her peers are going through a real change of their own echoing events that engulfed Russia in the past few decades. In Multiple Personalities, life is a masquerade and its participants are characters from classic world lite...

Everything eventually reaches its appointed place in time and space. Maria Matios's dramatic family saga, Hardly Ever Otherwise, narrates the story of several western Ukrainian families during the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and expands upon the idea that "it isn't time that is important, but the human condition in time."

From the first page, Matios engages her reader with an impeccable style, which she employs to create a rich tapestry of cause and effect, at times depicting...

Victor Erofeyev, a well-known author and dissident who is one of the leading lights of the new Russian literature, grew up at the heart of the Soviet political elite, and his autobiographical novel Good Stalin is inspired by his experiences in this prestigious, yet precarious position. His father, a staunch Stalinist who dedicated his life and soul to the party, works as Stalin's personal interpreter before rising rapidly to the top and enjoying an illustrious diplomatic career.Unquestioning ...

The "reality novel" A Poet and Bin-Laden set in Central Asia at the turn of the 21st century against a swirling backdrop of Islamic fundamentalism in the Ferghana Valley and beyond, gives a first-hand account on the militants and Taliban's internal life. The novel begins on the eve of 9/11, with the narrator's haunting description of the airplane attack on the Twin Towers as seen on TV while he is on holiday in Central Asia; and tells the story of an Uzbek poet Belgi, who was disappointed in...

The Investigator is set in the mid 20th century USSR. With Joseph Stalin at the helm the post-war Soviet society struggles to rebuild and heal the nation of its multiple wounds. Nothing comes easy. The authorities are being confronted with new and quite creative criminal structures that shatter socialist ideals.A young woman is murdered in a typical Soviet town somewhere in Ukraine. In the spirit of the era everyone is a suspect. Many theories of the crime emerge and to solve the mystery an i...

Zinaida Tulub's novel The Exile is one of the most brilliant works in the canon of fiction about Taras Shevchenko, the outstanding Ukrainian poet and artist.The idea of writing about Taras Shevchenko first occurred to her when she was in her thirties, during a period spent living in exile in Kazakhstan (1947-1956). Initially, Tulub worked on the screenplay for a film called Kobzar and Yakin, which can be seen as an early prototype for the novel. She was only able to start work on the latter a...

Maria Rybakova's Gnedich captures the reader's attention in its first stanzas with a striking allusion to Homeric Greece: "The rage that killed so many/the wretched rage of Achilles/who knew that he would perish/ that he would perish young. This is a novel-in-verse about the first Russian translator of the Iliad, the romantic poet and librarian Nikolai Gnedich (1784-1833). Since Gnedich spent almost his entire life translating Homer's epic poem, Maria Rybakova has chosen verse as the most ap...

A handful of families, several generations, more than a few wars. Moscow, Kabul, Barcelona. Anna Nemzer announces herself on the literary scene boldly and loudly with this debut novel about the insane, unspeakable nature of war, about human fears, treachery, lies, fateful coincidences and destinies during warfare, when there is no room left for love.The protagonists survived the war and are rescued from captivity. They are not able, however, to leave the experiences of the war behind them and...

From the first pages it becomes apparent that Asystole is a novel about love of life in its purest, instinctive and intimate form. It's also a novel about human faith in its existence and a desire to experience this love. Author Oleg Pavlov places his character - a boy who grows to be a man and is clearly personified by the writer's own outlook on life - in impossible and familiar circumstances, impossible not to relate to.An adult is shaped in childhood. Chaotic, anxious and at the same time...