Books from Ukraine

Marina Lewycka's debut novel opens with an eighty-four-year-old widower, a Ukrainian-born engineer living in England, who announces he plans to marry a thirty-six-year-old Ukrainian divorcee named Valentina. His two daughters, Vera and Nadezhda, have spent years at odds with each other, but the arrival of Valentina forces them into an uneasy alliance. Valentina is brash, determined, and openly pursuing a comfortable Western life, and the sisters set out to protect their father from what they see as a transparent scheme.

The story unfolds against a background of family history shaped by emigration and twentieth-century upheaval in Ukraine. As Vera and Nadezhda work together, long-buried tensions and memories surface between them, including disagreements rooted in their different experiences of displacement. Their father, meanwhile, occupies himself by writing a manuscript about the history of tractors in Ukrainian, a project that threads through the novel and connects his engineering past to his sense of identity.

Lewycka uses sharp, often physical comedy to carry the plot forward, setting domestic battles over green satin underwear, boil-in-the-bag meals, and immigration paperwork alongside quieter passages about aging, loyalty, and what family members owe each other across generations.

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Viktor, a struggling writer in post-Soviet Kyiv, shares his apartment with an unlikely companion: a penguin named Misha, adopted from the city zoo after it could no longer afford to feed its animals. Viktor's personal life is in poor shape. His girlfriend has left, his fiction goes nowhere, and his flat is cold and dim. Misha watches it all without comment.

A newspaper editor offers Viktor steady work writing obituaries, but the assignment has an odd condition. The subjects are not dead. They are prominent figures in Ukraine's new post-Communist order, and the obituaries are to be kept on file, ready for use when needed. Viktor accepts, glad for the income and the chance to see his writing in print. Before long, the subjects of his prepared obituaries begin dying, and Viktor realizes he has been pulled closer to something dangerous than a simple writing job should allow.

Andrey Kurkov sets his story in the Kyiv of the 1990s, a city adjusting to sudden economic and political change. The novel pairs dry, understated humor with a plot that grows steadily darker, using Viktor and his penguin as quiet observers of a society where power operates through arrangements most people never see.

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Kobzar is a collection of poems by Taras Shevchenko, first published in 1840. The title refers to a kobzar, a traditional Ukrainian traveling musician who played the kobza, a stringed instrument. Shevchenko himself was born into serfdom in 1814 and gained his freedom in 1838, shortly before the book appeared. His poems addressed Ukrainian history, language, folk life, and the conditions of ordinary people under imperial rule. Early editions were censored by the Russian czar, and Shevchenko was later arrested and sent into exile, where he was forbidden to write or paint.

Despite censorship, the collection became a foundational work for the Ukrainian language and literary tradition. Shevchenko wrote in Ukrainian at a time when the language had limited presence in published literature, and his poetry helped shape its modern written form. The book grew through successive editions as more poems were added over the years, and it remains closely tied to questions of Ukrainian cultural identity.

Peter Fedynsky, a Voice of America journalist with a background in Ukrainian studies, produced what is described in the record as the first complete English translation of the Kobzar, making the full collection accessible to English-speaking readers.

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In 1929, Joseph Stalin imposed agricultural collectivization across the Soviet Union, forcing millions of peasants from their land and into state-run collective farms. The policy triggered widespread crop failure and starvation. Between 1931 and 1933, at least five million people died of famine across the USSR, making it the most lethal famine recorded in European history. Anne Applebaum's Red Famine examines this period with a specific focus on Ukraine, where the death toll was concentrated and where the famine carried a particular political dimension.

Applebaum argues that more than three million Ukrainians who died in this period were not incidental victims of poor planning. She presents evidence that the Soviet state used the famine as a tool to suppress Ukrainian national identity and political resistance. Rather than directing relief to starving regions, authorities tightened grain requisitions and restricted movement out of affected areas. The book traces how Soviet leadership turned an agricultural disaster into a deliberate instrument of control.

The study draws on Ukrainian and Russian archival sources, many of which became accessible only after the end of the Soviet Union. Applebaum reconstructs events at multiple levels, from decisions made in Moscow to the experiences of individual villages and families across the Ukrainian countryside.

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Yevhen Klopotenko is widely regarded as Ukraine's most internationally recognized chef, and this cookbook collects 100 recipes drawn from years of research into regional cooking traditions across the country. The book covers a broad range of dishes, from borsch in its many regional variations to varenyky (filled dumplings), deruny (fried potato pancakes), and pampushky (garlic bread rolls). Fermentation, pickling, braised meats, baked goods, and desserts such as Lviv-style cheesecake and nut torte also feature throughout.

Klopotenko's approach centers on identifying dishes shaped by Ukraine's geography, agriculture, and local tradition. Ukraine has long been called the breadbasket of Europe, and the recipes here reflect that grain-growing landscape alongside an abundance of root vegetables, dairy, and preserved foods. The book presents these dishes in modern form while grounding them in their regional origins, distinguishing Ukrainian cuisine from the broader Soviet-era culinary narrative that often absorbed or relabeled it.

The collection is organized around everyday cooking as much as celebration. Breakfast dishes, simple salads, dips, and long-simmered braises sit alongside sweet baked goods and candied fruit. Vegetables receive particular attention, with fresh approaches to common ingredients found across Ukrainian kitchens.

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On April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine exploded, releasing radioactive contamination across large parts of Europe. Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimony from people who lived through the disaster and its aftermath: firefighters, evacuees, soldiers, scientists, doctors, and ordinary residents of the surrounding zone. Their accounts are presented in monologue form, each person speaking in their own voice about what they witnessed and what followed.

The book records experiences that do not fit neatly into the language of industrial accidents or political failures. People describe a changed relationship with everyday things: soil, water, food, rain. Contamination was invisible and odorless, and the danger it posed could not be sensed directly. Many of those interviewed were sent to clean up the site or were resettled from towns and villages that had to be abandoned. Others stayed. Alexievich arranges their words so that the scale of the event emerges through individual detail rather than summary.

The collection received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006. Alexievich later won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, recognized for her method of assembling individual voices into a composite record of Soviet and post-Soviet life.

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