A devastating story of the struggle of civilians caught up in the conflict in eastern Ukraine Chosen as one of "Six Books to Read for Context on Ukraine" by the New York Times Selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the "20 Best Books of 2021" "Powerful . . . For those who want a glimpse of what life will be like in Ukraine for years to come, The Orphanage offers a frightening glimpse."-Bill Marx, Arts Fuse If every war needs its master chronicler, Ukraine has Serhiy Zhadan, one of Europe's most promising novelists. Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling of A Farewell to Arms, The Orphanage is a searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. 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. Written with a raw intensity, this is a deeply personal account of violence that will be remembered as the definitive novel of the war in Ukraine.

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.

From Ukraine’s leading writer-activist comes an intimate account of resistance and survival in the earliest months of the Russian-Ukrainian war   “A vivid, in-the-trenches report from a Ukrainian city and its ‘injured, yet unbreakable’ citizens.�—Kirkus Reviews   When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Serhiy Zhadan took to social media to coordinate a network of resistance workers and send messages of courage to his fellow Ukrainians. What began as a local organizing effort exploded onto the international stage as readers around the globe looked to Zhadan as a key eyewitness documenting Russian atrocities.   In this powerful record of the war’s harrowing first four months, Zhadan works day and night in Kharkiv to evacuate children and the elderly from suburbs that have come under fire. He sends lists of life-saving medications to the West in the hopes of procuring them for civilians, coordinates food deliveries, collects money for military equipment, and organizes concerts. He shares photographs of the open sky—grateful for every pause in the shelling—and captures images of beloved institutions reduced to rubble. We’ll restore everything. We’ll rebuild everything, he writes.   As the days pass, the city empties. Friends are killed. And when images of the Bucha massacre are released, Zhadan’s own voice falters: I’m speechless. Hang in there, my friends. Tomorrow, we’ll wake up one day closer to our victory. An intimate work of witness literature, this book is at once the testimony of one man entering a new reality and the story of a society fighting for the right to exist.