No Country for Love

A sweeping, stunningly ambitious novel about a young Ukrainian girl arriving in Kharkiv in 1930, determined to contribute to the future of her country, and her struggle to survive the devastation and trauma that ravage Ukraine.

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'A captivating sweep of a novel about love, resilience and impossible choices... I loved it!' Christina Lamb, chief foreign correspondent Sunday Times

'Debora's story bears witness to the horrors of war and of Stalinism... an unflinching look at the cost of survival in terrible circumstances, which has sad echoes in modern-day Ukraine' The Times

Seventeen-year-old Debora Rosenbaum, ambitious and in love with literature, arrives in the capital of the new Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Kharkiv. The stale and forbidding ways of the past are out; 1930 is a new dawn, the Soviet era, where skyscrapers go up overnight. Debora finds work and meets a dashing young officer named Samuel who is training to become a fighter pilot.

But Debora's prospects - and Ukraine's - soon dim. State-induced famine rolls through the depleted countryside, and any deviation from Moscow ideology is punished by disappearance. When Samuel is sentenced to ten years' hard labour, Debora is left on her own with a baby. As advancing Nazi armies move through Ukraine, its yellow fields of wheat run red with blood. Forced to renounce the man she loves, her identity and even her name, Debora also learns to endure, manipulate and resist.

No Country for Love follows the hard choices Debora makes as Ukraine, caught between two totalitarian ideologies, turns into the deadliest place in the world - while she tries to protect those she loves most.

'An expansive novel reminiscent of the literary breadth, humanity, and historical depth found in Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate' Christophe Boltanski, winner of the 2015 Prix Femina for The Safe House