Lucky Breaks

(Paperback)

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Description

In Lucky Breaks, we encounter anonymous women from the margins ofUkrainian society, their lives upended by the ongoing conflict with Russia. Awoman, bewildered by her broken umbrella, tries to abandon it like a sick relative;a beautiful florist suddenly disappears, her shop converted into awarehouse for propaganda; hiding out from the shelling, neighbours readhoroscopes in the local paper that tell them when it's safe for them to go outside.

In stories of linguistic verve and absurdist wit, Yevgenia Belorusets writes oftrauma amidst the mundane, telling surreal, unsettling tales of survival in ashattered country.

'A daring, unsettling book about displaced women telling luminous storiesto survive the darkness that surrounds them' - Jenny Offill, author ofWeather

Reviews

'[Lucky Breaks] is a book in Russian about the war in Ukraine that does not describe combat operations and that forbears to generalize in any way... The tender and terrible stories of Yevgenia Belorusets, where bogeyman tales of childhood dress in the language of Jean Genet, and the documentary dilates into the epic, become the history we all have in common' - Maria Stepanova, author of In Memory of Memory

'Women... find themselves constructing surreal narratives in an attempt to capture the strangeness of living a life under bombardment.' - Daily Mail

'Ukraine's Catch-22... an uncompromising tableau of individuals dislodged by conflict some years before Russia's full-scale invasion... Humour is not a way out for these women, but it does allow the reader a way in... these are stories that stay with you' - The Telegraph

'A tantalisingly oblique collection... as sharp and fragmentary as the shards of lives upended.' - Catherine Taylor, Irish Times

Author Bio

Yevgenia Belorusets is a Ukrainian writer, journalist, artist,and photographer who lives between Kyiv and Berlin. Herphotographic work calls attention to the more vulnerablesections of Ukrainian society - queer families, out-of-workcoal miners, the Roma, people living in the war zone in theEast - and was shown in the Ukrainian pavilion at the 56thVenice Biennale. She is a member of the Hudrada curatorialcollective and cofounder of Prostory, a journal for literature,art, and politics. She was awarded the 2020 HKW InternationalLiterature Award in Germany for Lucky Breaks, herfirst work of fiction.