Three summers ago, we read a book from Ukraine which we loved. But with the war in Ukraine, we’ve decided it’s important to re-read this country instead of picking a new one to read especially since the original book chosen fell into the category of fantasy instead of focusing on the history with Russia.
For August, you can choose:
The book the club read 3 years ago & loved.
1 of the other 5 Ukrainian books that had great reviews, but didn’t win the vote.
1 of the 12 other reads from or related to Ukraine.
Note: You’ll notice we’re not including “the” in front of Ukraine even though to many it sounds as if it should be included when writing it in a sentence. This is because “The Ukraine” is the way the Russians referred to the land during Soviet times. When it became a country in its own right, Ukrainians noted it should only be referred to as “Ukraine”. Please also be aware that “Kyiv” should always be used in lieu of “Kiev” when referring to the capital. As my Ukrainian coworker just pointed out, Kyiv is derived from the Ukrainian language name whereas “Kiev” is derived from Russian. Kyiv was also recognized as the official standard by the US Board on Geographic Names in 2006 & by the Associated Press in 2019.
Original Ukrainian Read (Highly Recommended!)
Winner of Best Book from both Amazon & Paste Magazine
The definitive English language translation of this internationally acclaimed novel—a brilliant dark fantasy combining psychological suspense, enchantment, and terror that makes us consider human existence in a fresh and provocative way.
Our life is brief . . .
Sasha Samokhina has been accepted to the Institute of Special Technologies.
Or, more precisely, she’s been chosen.
Situated in a tiny village, she finds the students are bizarre, and the curriculum even more so. The books are impossible to read, the lessons obscure to the point of maddening, and the work refuses memorization. Using terror and coercion to keep the students in line, the school does not punish them for their transgressions and failures; instead, it is their families that pay a terrible price. Yet despite her fear, Sasha undergoes changes that defy the dictates of matter and time; experiences which are nothing she has ever dreamed of . . . and suddenly all she could ever want.
A complex blend of adventure, magic, science, and philosophy that probes the mysteries of existence, filtered through a distinct Ukrainian sensibility, this astonishing work of speculative fiction—brilliantly translated by Julia Meitov Hersey—is reminiscent of modern classics such as Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Max Barry’s Lexicon, and Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, but will transport them to a place far beyond those fantastical worlds.
“Vita Nostra — a cross between Lev Grossman’s The Magicians and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian is the anti-Harry Potter you didn’t know you wanted.” —The Washington Post
“Vita Nostra has the potential to become a modern classic of its genre, and I couldn’t be more excited to see it get the global audience in English it so richly deserves.” - Lev Grossman
(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)
The 5 Original Other Books from the Vote Written by Ukrainians
News of the death by starvation of 7 million Ukrainians by Stalin was actively suppressed & denied for decades. It was only in the late 1980s that the world truly became aware of this atrocity & it wasn’t until 2006 when it was defined as a deliberate act of genocide. Soon after, a survivor broke his silence to provide the chilling details in this well-written & well-reviewed book which reads like a novel.
In 1929, in an effort to destroy the well-to-do peasant farmers, Joseph Stalin ordered the “collectivization” of all Ukrainian farms. In the ensuing years, a brutal Soviet campaign of confiscations, terrorizing, and murder spread throughout Ukrainian villages in the “breadbasket of Europe.” What food remained after the seizures was insufficient to support the population. In the resulting famine, as many as seven million Ukrainians starved to death.
This poignant eyewitness account of the famine by one of the survivors relates the young Miron Dolot's day-to-day confrontation with despair and death—his helplessness as friends and family were arrested and abused—and his gradual realization, as he matured, of the absolute control the Soviets had over his life and the lives of his people. But it is also the story of personal dignity in the face of horror and humiliation. And it is an indictment of a chapter in the Soviet past that is still not acknowledged by Russian leaders.
(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)
Nikolai Gogol's hilarious and macabre tale of a Christmas Eve with a devil and a romantic twist.
It is the night before Christmas and devilry is afoot. The devil steals the moon and hides it in his pocket. He is thus free to run amok and inflicts all sorts of wicked mischief upon the village of Dikanka by unleashing a snowstorm. But the one he’d really like to torment is the town blacksmith, Vakula, who creates paintings of the devil being vanquished. Vakula is in love with Oksana, but she will have nothing to do with him. Vakula, however, is determined to win her over, even if it means battling the devil.
Taken from Nikolai Gogol’s first successful work, the story collection, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, The Night Before Christmas is available here for the first time as a stand-alone novella and is a perfect introduction to the great satirist.
(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)
The Ukrainian version of Trainspotting, bluntly nihilistic and unexpectedly hilarious.
In 1993, tragic turbulence takes over Ukraine in the post-communist spin-off. As if in somnambulism, Soviet war veterans and upstart businessmen listen to an American preacher of whose type there were plenty at the time in the post-Soviet territory. In Kharkiv, the young communist head quarters are now an advertising agency, and a youth radio station creates a feature on the Irish folk band Depeche Mode and the role of the harmonica in the struggle against capitalist oppression. And so the Western songs make their way into ordinary Ukrainian homes of ordinary people.
In the middle of this craze, three friends—an anti-Semitic Jew Dog Pavlov, an unfortunate entrepreneur Vasia the Communist and the narrator Zhadan, nineteen years of age and unemployed—seek to find their old pal Sasha Carburator to tell him that his step-father shot himself dead. Characters confront elements of their reality, and, tainted with traumatic survival fever, embark on a sad, dramatic and a bit grotesque adventure.
(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)
Through stream-of-consciousness writing, this literary work is an inspired exposition of one woman’s fight to catch her bearings and land on her feet, after life has thrown her a particularly nasty curve ball. At the heart of the story is a failed relationship, and here the author’s unflinching courage in dissecting the how-and-why is gripping. The larger story that envelops the love affair is, of course, the story of Ukraine itself, so unexpectedly liberated with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, coming to grips with its suppressed history and martyrology searching for its identity together with the heroine.
Called “the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence,” Field Work in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko is the tale of one woman’s personal revolt provoked by a top literary scandal of the decade. The author, a noted Ukrainian poet and novelist, explains: “When you turn 30, you inevitably start reconsidering what you have been taught in your formative years—that is, if you really seek for your own voice as a writer. In my case, my personal identity crisis had coincided with the one experienced by my country after the advent of independence. The result turned explosive: Field Work in Ukrainian Sex.”
(A special thank you to book club member, Shivalaxmi Arumugham for the group read suggestion.)
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 a logic that is both bitter and enigmatic. But nothing is ever fully revealed—it is only in the final pages of the novel that the events in the beginning are understood as a necessary part of a larger whole, and the section entitled “Seasickness” presents a compelling argument for why events almost always have to follow a particular course.
In Matios’s multi-tiered plot, the grand passions of ordinary people are illuminated under the caliginous light of an ethereal mysticism, and digressions on love, envy, transgression, and atonement are woven into the story. The reader is submerged into a rich world populated by a grand cast of characters and ideas, which Matios animates with her prolific imagination and subtle wisdom.
Each character in this outstanding drama has an irrefutable alibi, a unique truth, and a private conflict with honor and duty. Her characters do not always act in accordance with logic and written-law, as the laws of honor clash with the laws of the heart. And this is why it is hardly ever otherwise.”
(A special thank you to book club member, Leslie Tchaikovsky for the group read suggestion.)
A unique work of fiction from the troubled streets of Ukraine, giving invaluable testimony to the new history unfolding in the nation’s post-independence years.
This captivating book is Serhiy Zhadan’s ode to Kharkiv, the traditionally Russian-speaking city in Eastern Ukraine where he makes his home. A leader among Ukrainian post-independence authors, Zhadan employs both prose and poetry to address the disillusionment, complications, and complexities that have marked Ukrainian life in the decades following the Soviet Union’s collapse. His novel provides an extraordinary depiction of the lives of working-class Ukrainians struggling against an implacable fate: the road forward seems blocked at every turn by demagogic forces and remnants of the Russian past. Zhadan’s nine interconnected stories and accompanying poems are set in a city both representative and unusual, and his characters are simultaneously familiar and strange. Following a kind of magical-realist logic, his stories expose the grit and burden of stalled lives, the universal desire for intimacy, and a wistful realization of the off-kilter and even perverse nature of love.
(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)
12 Other Reads from or Related to Ukraine
Written by a US author about his time in Ukraine after he met a Ukrainian woman
Love & Vodka is a book with broad appeal. It is a unique hybrid of travel memoir and love story that seamlessly blends humor, culture shock, and romance. It is about taking a chance in life and seeing where it leads, as well as learning more about the world—and about yourself. The world is large and full of potential; one just needs to be willing to take a gamble and explore the possibilities that exist.
Bobby is over the moon after sharing a bike on the E.T. ride at Universal Studios with Katya. Join our “intrepid crusader” as he takes a leap of faith—traveling from comfortable “have-a-nice day and have-a-warm-shower” suburban Detroit to the former center of Cold War Soviet missile production. And unbeknownst to anyone but himself, he's bringing an engagement ring! Experience life in a city that, until the mid-1980s, was closed to foreign visitors. R.J. Fox's humorous, poignant, and memorable expedition is punctuated by a colorful cast of characters, adventures, and cultural mishaps and misunderstandings—from irate babushka women to hard-drinking uncles. Armchair travelers and romantics will find themselves both schooled in hard knocks and heartened to have shared in the unforgettable experience of Love & Vodka!
Written by a US author about the disappearance of his Ukrainian family during the Holocaust
A NY Times Notable Book, winner of the National Jewish Book Award & the National Book Critics Circle Award, a LA Times Book Prize Finalist
In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic—part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work—that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history.
The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust—an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him.
Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews and provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.
Written by an author born in Soviet-era Odessa who migrated to the US at age 16
Winner of the prestigious Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, selected by poet and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Eleanor Wilner who says, “I'm so happy to have a manuscript that I believe in so powerfully, poetry with such a deep music. I love it.’”
One might spend a lifetime reading books by emerging poets without finding the real thing, the writer who (to paraphrase Emily Dickinson) can take the top of your head off. Kaminsky is the real thing. Impossibly young, this immigrant makes the English language sing with the sheer force of his music, a wondrous irony, as Ilya Kaminsky has been deaf since the age of four. In Odessa itself, “A city famous for its drunk tailors, huge gravestones of rabbis, horse owners and horse thieves, and most of all, for its stuffed and baked fish,” Kaminksy dances with the strangest — and the most recognizable — of our bedfellows in a distinctive and utterly brilliant language, a language so particular and deft that it transcends all of our expectations, and is by turns luminous and universal.”
Written by an author who was born in Soviet-era Ukraine
A city-dwelling executive heads home to take over his brother's gas station after his mysterious disappearance, but all he finds at home are mysteries and ghosts. The bleak industrial landscape of now-war-torn eastern Ukraine sets the stage for Voroshilovgrad, the Soviet era name of the Ukrainian city of Luhansk, mixing magical realism and exhilarating road novel in poetic, powerful, and expressive prose.
“One of the most important creative forces in modern Ukrainian alternative culture.” — KulturSpiegel
“A homecoming is by turns magical and brutal in Zhadan's impressive picaresque novel. . . . For Zhadan, loyalty and fraternity are the life-giving forces in this exhausted, fertile, near-anarchic corner of the country . . . readers will be touched by his devotion to a land of haunted beauty, ‘high sky,’ and ‘black earth.’”— Publishers Weekly
”With Voroshilovgrad, Zhadan has created an authentic poetics of post–Soviet rural devastation. His ragged, sympathetic characters aren’t the newly rich post–Soviets of Moscow, the urban oligarchs Peter Pomerantsev has described, who ‘sing hymns to Russian religious conservatism — and keep their money and families in London.’ They are individuals struggling to come to terms with their place in history and with the history of their place.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“The power source for Zhadan's writing is in its linguistic passion.” —Die Zeit
Written by a US author who lived in the former Soviet Union as well as Poland
An Economist Best Book of the Year, & the UK’s Sunday Times, Times, FT, and Evening Standard Book of the Year
From Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes—the consequences of which still resonate today
In 1929, Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a 2nd Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief, the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them.
Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: after a series of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic’s borders and seized all available food. Starvation set in rapidly, and people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases, they killed one another for food. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil.
Written by an author who was born in Soviet-era Ukraine
Spanning 60 tumultuous years of Ukrainian history, this multi-generational saga weaves a dramatic and intricate web of love, sex, friendship, and death. At its center: three women linked by the abandoned secrets of the past—secrets that refuse to remain hidden.
While researching a story, journalist Daryna unearths a worn photograph of Olena Dovgan, a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army killed in 1947 by Stalin’s secret police. Intrigued, Daryna sets out to make a documentary about the extraordinary woman—and unwittingly opens a door to the past that will change the course of the future. For even as she delves into the secrets of Olena’s life, Daryna grapples with the suspicious death of a painter who just may be the latest victim of a corrupt political power play.
From the dim days of World War II to the eve of Orange Revolution, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is an “epic of enlightening force that explores the enduring power of the dead over the living.”
(A special thank you to book club member, Ester Elbert for the suggestion.)
Written by an author who was born in Soviet-era Ukraine
An internationally-acclaimed documentary novel that describes the fateful collision of Russia, Ukraine, and Nazi Germany, and one of the largest mass executions of the Holocaust.
“Everything in this book is true.”
Anatoly Kuznetsov was a twelve-year-old living in Kyiv, Ukraine, when the Germans occupied the city in 1941. His age allowed him to escape the notice of Nazi perpetrators and local collaborators as he observed the war crimes committed against Jews, Roma, Ukrainian nationalists, and Soviet prisoners of war. More than 33,700 people lost their lives in a two-day massacre, followed by as many as 66,000 over the next two years.
At 14, Kuznetsov began writing about what he had seen, later supplementing his manuscript with survivor and eyewitness testimony, supporting documents, and the efforts of the Soviet government to conceal any trace of the atrocities perpetrated at Babi Yar. The serialized book was published in the USSR only after extensive censorship, but Kuznetsov converted the original full text to film and smuggled it out of Russia when he defected.
Now restored to its original condition, Babi Yar offers a unique, multi-faceted perspective of some of the darkest days of the Holocaust, written by a surviving witness.
Written & illustrated by an author originally from Ukraine who is currently based in Israel
Classic fairytales get a refreshing satirical twist in this collection of illustrated stories in which gnomes, pixies, and other fairy folk share tall tales of the strange and unbelievable human world and its inhabitants. Brimming with keen observations and wild assumptions on human anatomy, customs, languages, rituals, dwellings, and more, The Land of Stone Flowers is as absurd as it is astounding, examining contradictory and nonsensical human behaviors through the lens of the fantastic: from the bewitching paper wizards who live in humans' wallets to their invisible hats, known as “moods,” which cloud their view of the world. Bursting with intricate and evocative illustrations, The Land of Stone Flowers will draw readers into a world of fantasy and fable that slyly reveals many hidden truths about human existence.
“After reading The Land of Stone Flowers, you'll come away with a new appreciation for the magical world, for your own world, and for your place in it. And you'll learn to laugh a bit more at yourself and those around you. You may even start believing in magic. Magic that is invented in our minds and made real by our words and our pens. Magic that adds life to the human experience. Magic that touches even people like me who are strongly rooted in logic and objective truth...In the end, all I can say is, 'Wow.' This book is a masterpiece.” —GeekDad
”What would fairies and mythical creatures think of humans? This gem of a book seeks to answer that question - and does so through gorgeous art nouveau illustrations and imaginative tales. You'll savor each page.” —Refinery 29
Written by aN author who was born in Soviet-era Ukraine to a Jewish family
A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript, but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century.
Interweaving a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an immense, intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope.
Life and Fate juxtaposes bedrooms and snipers’ nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag, taking us deep into the hearts and minds of characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin themselves. This novel of unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity is one of the supreme achievements of modern Ukrainian literature.
Written by aN author born in Soviet-era Ukraine who emigrated to the US After criticizing an important Soviet official
Many years after making his way to America from Odessa in Soviet Ukraine, Emil Draitser made a startling discovery: every time he uttered the word ‘Jewish’—even in casual conversation—he lowered his voice. This behavior was a natural by-product, he realized, of growing up in the anti-Semitic, post-Holocaust Soviet Union, when “Shush!” was the most frequent word he heard: “Don't use your Jewish name in public. Don't speak a word of Yiddish. And don't cry over your murdered relatives.”
This compelling memoir conveys the reader back to Draitser's childhood and provides a unique account of mid-20th century life in Russia as the young Draitser struggles to reconcile the harsh values of Soviet society with the values of his working-class Jewish family. Lively, evocative, and rich with humor, this unforgettable story ends with the death of Stalin and, through life stories of the author's ancestors, presents a sweeping panorama of two centuries of Jewish history in Russia.”
Written by an author from the US who lived in Ukraine before moving to France
Winner of the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance, a top ten debut novel by Publishers Weekly, & Book of the Month by National Geographic Traveler
Odessa, Ukraine, is the humor capital of the former Soviet Union, but in an upside-down world where waiters earn more than doctors and Odessans depend on the Mafia for basics like phone service and medical supplies, no one is laughing. After months of job hunting, Daria, a young engineer, finds a plum position at a foreign firm as a secretary. But every plum has a pit. In this case, it's Mr. Harmon, who makes it clear that sleeping with him is job one. Daria evades Harmon's advances by recruiting her neighbor, the slippery Olga, to be his mistress. But soon, Olga sets her sights on Daria's job.
Daria begins to moonlight as an interpreter at Soviet Unions™, a matchmaking agency that organizes “socials” where lonely American men can meet desperate Odessan women. Her grandmother wants Daria to leave Ukraine for good and pushes her to marry one of the men she meets, but Daria already has feelings for a local. She must choose between her world and America, between Vlad, a sexy, irresponsible mobster, and Tristan, a teacher nearly twice her age. Daria chooses security and America. Only it's not exactly what she thought it would be...
A wry, tender, and darkly funny look at marriage, the desires we don't acknowledge, and the aftermath of communism, Moonlight in Odessa is a novel about the choices and sacrifices that people make in the pursuit of love and stability.
Compiled from the notebooks of a Soviet-era Ukrainian born to a Jewish family
When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, Vasily Grossman became a special correspondent for the Red Star, the Soviet Army's newspaper, and reported from the frontlines of the war. A Writer at War depicts in vivid detail the crushing conditions on the Eastern Front, and the lives and deaths of soldiers and civilians alike. Witnessing some of the most savage fighting of the war, Grossman saw firsthand the repeated early defeats of the Red Army, the brutal street fighting in Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk (the largest tank engagement in history), the defense of Moscow, the battles in Ukraine, the atrocities at Treblinka, and much more.
Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova have taken Grossman's raw notebooks, and fashioned them into a gripping narrative providing one of the most even-handed descriptions—at once unflinching and sensitive—we have ever had of what Grossman called “the ruthless truth of war.”