Do you want to learn more about Ukraine? Take a look at this list of books written by Ukrainian and Ukrainian-American writers to experience the culture of Europe's second largest country.
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Please don't come back from the moon
by Dean Bakopoulos When his father disappears along with several other men from their blue-collar Detroit neighborhood, sixteen-year-old Michael Smolij witnesses the effects of large-scale abandonment on the community's wives and mothers and, in the years that follow, experiences along with his friends the same restlessness that carried away their fathers. |
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Absolute Zero
by Artem Chekh A first person account of a soldier’s journey, and is based on Artem Chekh’s diary that he wrote during his service in the war in Donbas. One of the most important messages the book conveys is that war means pain. Chekh is not showing the reader any heroic combat, focusing instead on the quiet, mundane, and harsh soldier’s life. Chekh masterfully selects the most poignant details of this kind of life. |
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A backpack, a bear, and eight crates of vodka : a memoir
by Lev Golinkin A former Jewish refugee recounts his family's desperate flight from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and his personal quest to retrace their journey years later to thank the strangers who helped them. |
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Grey Bees
by Andrey Kurkov 49-year-old safety inspector-turned-beekeeper Sergey Sergeich, wants little more than to help his bees collect their pollen in peace. But Sergey lives in Ukraine, where a lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda has been dragging on for years. His simple mission on behalf of his bees leads him through some the hottest spots of the ongoing conflict, putting him in contact with combatants and civilians on both sides of the battle lines: loyalists, separatists, Russian occupiers, and Crimean Tatars. |
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A short history of tractors in Ukrainian
by Marina Lewycka Putting aside a lifetime of rivalry when they learn that their recently widowed father is planning to remarry a gold-digging woman, sisters Vera and Nadezhda find themselves outmaneuvered by their father's scheming fiancée, a situation that is compromised by a hurricane, family secrets, and their father's obsession with tractor history. |
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Words for War : New Poems from Ukraine
by Oksana Maksymchuk The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine brought about an emergence of a distinctive trend in contemporary Ukrainian poetry: the poetry of war. Directly and indirectly, the poems collected in this volume engage with the events and experiences of war, reflecting on the themes of alienation, loss, dislocation, and disability; as well as justice, heroism, courage, resilience, generosity, and forgiveness. In addressing these themes, the poems also raise questions about art, politics, citizenship, and moral responsibility. The anthology brings together some of the most compelling poetic voices from different regions of Ukraine. Young and old, female and male, somber and ironic, tragic and playful, filled with extraordinary terror and ordinary human delights, the voices recreate the human sounds of war in its tragic complexity. |
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Sweet Darusya: a tale of two villages
by Mariia Matios The best contemporary Ukrainian novel written since Ukrainian Independence in 1991. It reveals a family saga that is much more dynamic than classical sagas and at the same time is much more touching and engaging. It is an emotional history of Ukraine with a very well researched and vivid historical background that gives the reader the opportunity to understand not only the characters and their drama, but the entire drama of the country/countries in which they lived without leaving their village. |
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Stars & Poppy Seeds
by Romana Romanyshyn As the daughter of well-known mathematicians, Dora loves to count more than anything in the world. She counts all the things around her, all the animals, grains of sand on the beach and letters in her Dad's newspaper. When Dora looks at the Milky Way, she begins to wonder how to count the mesmerising number of stars. Is it even possible? Is the night sky so full of stars that even all the numbers she knows would not be enough to count them? Dora soon learns that she needs to deal with such a complicated task by starting with the simplest of steps, and who knows, maybe one day, she will achieve her dream. |
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The boy from Reactor 4
by Orest Stelmach Searching for information on her father, Nadia receives a cryptic clue from a stranger that will propel her on a treasure hunt from New York to Ukraine. |
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The sky unwashed : a novel
by Irene Zabytko Based on real events and people, this novel follows a Ukrainian family that returns to their devastated town soon after the Chernobyl disaster, where death and privation await them in the wake of the world's worst nuclear accident. |
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The orphanage : a novel
by Serhiĭ ZHadan "When hostile soldiers invade a neighboring city, Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian language teacher, sets out for the orphanage where his nephew Sasha lives, now in occupied territory. Venturing into combat zones, traversing shifting borders, and forging uneasy alliances along the way, Pasha realizes where his true loyalties lie in an increasingly desperate fight to rescue Sasha and bring him home."--Publisher |