"A teacher crosses a war-torn country to bring his nephew home. Zhadan is less interested in portraying warfare as he is in showing how civilians survive in a war zone, how every encounter is full of uncertainty and tension."
Publisher Yale University Press
Publication Date February 23, 2021
Section New Titles - Paperback / Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Steve P.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780300243017
A searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine
“A nightmarish, raw vision of contemporary eastern Ukraine under siege. . . . With a poet’s sense of lyricism . . . [Zhadan] unblinkingly reveals a country’s devastation and its people’s passionate determination to survive.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
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.
| Serhiy Zhadan, widely considered to be one of the most important young writers in Ukraine, is the author of Mesopotamia and What We Live For, What We Die For: Selected Poems. Reilly Costigan-Humes translates literature from the Ukrainian and Russian. Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler is a translator and poet from New England. |
