No Country for Love

(Paperback)

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'A beautiful, important and timely rendering of Jewish life in Ukraine through the travails of the 20th century. Both historical and page-turning' Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends and Super Sad True Love Story

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

Seventeen-year-old Deborah Rosenbaum, ambitious and in love with literature, arrives in the capital of the new Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Kharkiv, 1930, to make her own fate as a modern woman. The stale and forbidding ways of the past are out; it's a new dawn, the Soviet era, where skyscrapers go up overnight. Deborah finds work and meets a dashing young officer named Samuel who is training to become a fighter pilot. They fall in love, and begin to become part of Ukraine's new cultural elite.

But Deborah's prospects - and Ukraine's - soon dim. Famine rolls through the over-harvested countryside, and any deviation from Moscow-dictated ideology is punished by disappearance: without warning, Samuel is sentenced to ten years' hard labour. Deborah is on her own with a baby. And this is only the beginning.

As advancing Nazi armies move through Ukraine during World War II, 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 - and she has to protect those she loves most.

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.

Reviews

A beautiful, important and timely rendering of Jewish life in Ukraine through the travails of the 20th century. Both historical and page-turning * Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends and Super Sad True Love Story *
At a time when many people are scrambling to understand Ukraine, No Country for Love gives us the story of the country's painful twentieth century as a sweeping romantic epic. It links the personal and the political in a way that cuts through wartime propaganda, restoring both human scale and moral complexity. * Hari Kunzru *
A captivating sweep of a novel about love, resilience and impossible choices in a Ukraine caught between Soviets and Nazism and riven by war - I loved it! * Christina Lamb, chief foreign correspondent Sunday Times *
A chilling account of what it means to live under a totalitarian regime. With the sharp pen of an award-winning journalist and the tender heart of a poet, Yaroslav Trofimov has woven an exquisite and enduring tale of survival, courage, and resistance. Epic yet intimate, heart-breaking yet hopeful, terrifying yet inspiring, No Country for Love is a love letter to Ukraine and a gift to anyone who appreciates peace * Nguyen Phan Que Mai, internationally best-selling author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child *
Through the saga of a Jewish Ukrainian family unfolding from the 1930's until the post war, Yaroslav Trofimov delivers a literary epic taking place on the "bloodlands" - to borrow the title from Timothy Snyder's book - scarred from the Nazi and Stalinist atrocities. It is an expansive novel reminiscent of the literary breath, the humanity, and the historical density found in Vassili Grossman's Life and Fate * Christophe Boltanski, winner of the 2015 Femina Prize for La Cache *
Tough, lean, and unsentimental, No Country for Love is a powerful moral testament that reads like a thriller, as its impressive heroine learns to do what is necessary, day by day, in order to endure one of the most harrowing passages of the 20th century. It is also an unsparing account of the tribulations of ordinary Ukrainians, from the Holomodor, through the horrors of World War II, to the death of Stalin. By turns terrifying, tender, and inspiring, this gripping and necessary novel illuminates the origins of a story whose latest chapters are being played out before the world even today * James Hynes, author of Next and Sparrow *

Author Bio

Yaroslav Trofimov was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and, after a childhood in Madagascar and adolescence in New York, has worked all over the world for the Wall Street Journal, where he serves as the chief foreign-affairs correspondent. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting in 2022 and in 2023, among many other honours, he is one of the pre-eminent war correspondents of our time and the author of three books of narrative non-fiction. This is his first novel.