The Rooster House: A Ukrainian Family Memoir

(Paperback)

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Description

In the Ukrainian city of Poltava stands a building known as the Rooster House, an elegant mansion with two voluptuous red roosters flanking the door. It doesn't look horrifying. And yet, when Victoria was a girl growing up in the 1980s, her great-grandmother would take pains to avoid walking past it.

In 2014, while the Russian state was annexing Crimea, Victoria visited her grandmother in Bereh, the hamlet near Poltava that was a haven in her childhood. Just before the trip she came across her great-grandfather's diary, one page scored deep with the single line: 'Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine.' She had never heard of this uncle and no one - especially her grandmother - seemed willing to tell her about him.

Victoria became obsessed with recovering his story, and returned to her birth country again and again in pursuit of it. In the end, after years of sifting through Ukraine's post-Soviet bureaucracy, after travelling to tiny, ruined villages and speaking to the wizened survivors of that era, her winding search took her back to the place she had always known it would - to the Rooster House, and the dark truths contained in its basement.

Inspired by the author's love for her family, and peopled by warm, larger-than-life characters who jostle alongside the ghostly absences of others, The Rooster House is at once a riveting journey into the complex history of a wounded country and a profoundly moving tribute to hope and the refusal of despair.

Reviews

The Rooster House is so many things at once, and all of them pull at my heart. The book is a seriously beautiful evocation of an imperilled nation and an account of a personal quest to retrieve the memories and secrets that families and states maintain. It's a careful meditation on exile, on return and belonging, and what it means to be. And most of all it's a paean to hope and home, written with such gentleness and deep adherence to emotional truth that to me its words become a fierceness to cast against harm, hardship and hurt. I loved it and it will haunt me for a long time. -- Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk
The familiar village symbol of a rooster on the roof hides a dark secret in Victora Belim's marvellously vivid and often heartbreaking account of a personal quest, one that leads us deep into the complexities that lie behind news headlines while introducing us to an unforgettable group of characters. I read it in a single enthralled sitting -- Miranda Seymour, author of I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys
A Wild Swans for Ukraine ... an enthralling, multilayered family story, told across four generations. Rich and magnificent. A marvel * Bookseller *
A haunting quest - beautifully told, with stunning momentum - travelling through place, history, and private memory on the fraying edge of Europe. I loved this book: the voice, the determination, the pace, the characters, the insights into exile and belonging, into remembering and forgetting. A book where the search for truth shines so brightly, The Rooster House feels like an instant classic: an essential book in these darkening times. * Sophy Roberts, author of The Lost Pianos of Sibera *
A compelling, beautifully written and researched family memoir that weaves together the personal and the political and gives the reader an insight into the complexity of Ukraine's history -- Meriel Schindler, author of The Lost Cafe Schindler
[A] poignant, gently unfolding . . . elegant family narrative of myriad characters traumatized by the deep-seated Russia-Ukrainian struggle. . . Throughout this powerful text, readers will encounter numerous satisfying layers * Kirkus *

Author Bio

Victoria Belim is a writer, journalist, and translator of Persian literature and poetry. She has a column in the Financial Times and her writing on culture and lifestyle topics has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, ELLE, Red Magazine, and Marie Claire. She speaks eighteen languages, including Japanese, Turkish, and Indonesian. Born in Ukraine, Victoria grew up in the USA and now lives in Brussels, Belgium.