Ukraine — The Book Roads

Books from Ukraine

Valerian Pidmohylnyi

Stepan Radchenko arrives in Kyiv from the Ukrainian countryside with ambitions of studying economics and eventually returning home to help modernise rural life. But the capital soon becomes more than a place of education: it is a world of opportunity, temptation, and reinvention. As Stepan moves from the city’s outskirts into its cultural and literary circles, he pursues success as a writer while navigating a series of romantic relationships that shape his understanding of himself. Gradually, his original ideals give way to ambition, vanity, and a growing desire to conquer the city on his own terms. Kyiv becomes both the setting for his transformation and a force that challenges his sense of belonging. First published in 1928, The City is considered a landmark of modern Ukrainian literature. Combining psychological realism with philosophical reflection, Pidmohylnyi examines urbanisation, social mobility, desire, and the tension between rural origins and modern identity. Stepan’s journey raises a timeless question: when we reinvent ourselves to achieve success, what parts of our original selves do we leave behind?

2025

The Orphanage

Serhiy Zhadan

Set in eastern Ukraine during the war in Donbas, The Orphanage follows Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian language teacher who has spent his life avoiding politics and keeping his distance from the conflicts around him. When fighting reaches a neighbouring city, he must cross the front line to retrieve his thirteen-year-old nephew, Sasha, from a boarding school that has become increasingly dangerous. What should be a straightforward journey turns into a harrowing passage through a landscape devastated by shelling, military checkpoints, and collapsing infrastructure. As Pasha encounters soldiers, displaced civilians, and people struggling to survive, his familiar world becomes unrecognisable. With each step, he is forced to reconsider his loyalties, his responsibilities, and what it means to belong to a country at war. Written with stark lyricism and an unflinching eye for everyday suffering, Zhadan’s novel portrays the human cost of armed conflict. Beyond the physical dangers, it explores indifference, moral responsibility, and the difficult realisation that remaining neutral may no longer be possible. The Orphanage won the 2022 EBRD Literature Prize.

2021

Arabesques

Serhiy Zhadan

Set in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, during Russia’s full-scale invasion, Arabesques is a collection of interconnected stories about ordinary people trying to preserve their humanity in extraordinary circumstances. Through intimate snapshots of daily life, Serhiy Zhadan portrays a city transformed by war, where familiar routines have been disrupted by bombardment, loss, and the constant threat of death. The characters navigate weddings, love affairs, funerals, and reunions with loved ones returning from the front. Volunteers deliver humanitarian aid, families struggle to protect elderly relatives, and wounded soldiers attempt to rebuild their lives. Their experiences reveal the fragile connections that sustain communities even as violence reshapes the world around them. Returning to characters and settings from his earlier works, including Mesopotamia and The Orphanage, Zhadan captures both the vulnerability and quiet resilience of Ukrainian society. With understated compassion, he explores grief, solidarity, memory, and the persistence of everyday life amid destruction. Arabesques is a powerful literary portrait of a community determined to endure.

2026

Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories

Oksana Zabuzhko

In Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories, Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko brings together a collection of fiction exploring the intimate connections between personal experience, collective memory, and national identity. Originally published in Ukrainian in 2014, the collection moves between the political upheavals of independent Ukraine and the seemingly ordinary dramas of everyday life, revealing how history shapes even the most private moments. Through stories involving the Orange Revolution, family rivalries, romantic encounters, and unexpected personal triumphs, Zabuzhko examines the stories people tell themselves to make sense of their lives. Her characters navigate the complicated relationship between truth and illusion, individual desires and collective expectations, and the past and present. Myth, folklore, and fairy-tale elements frequently enter these recognisable settings, unsettling the boundary between what is real and what is imagined. Lyrical, intellectually playful, and sharply observant, the collection explores how personal narratives become intertwined with cultural memory. Zabuzhko asks how individuals and nations construct their identities—and what happens when the stories that sustain them begin to unravel.

2020

The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Oksana Zabuzhko

Spanning more than six decades of Ukrainian history, from the Second World War to the early 2000s, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is an ambitious, multigenerational novel about memory, resistance, and the hidden forces shaping national identity. In contemporary Kyiv, journalist Daryna Hoshchynska discovers an old photograph of Olena Dovhan, a young Ukrainian partisan who was killed by Soviet secret police in 1947 after being betrayed by her lover. Fascinated by Olena’s story, Daryna begins investigating her life, uncovering secrets that connect the wartime resistance to the political realities of modern Ukraine. As her research deepens, personal relationships, family histories, and forgotten traumas become entangled with the country’s turbulent past. Moving between generations and historical periods, Zabuzhko explores Soviet repression, political violence, cultural memory, and the enduring consequences of historical silence. Combining historical fiction, psychological drama, and elements of the supernatural, the novel asks how the past survives within the present—and how recovering buried stories can reshape a nation’s understanding of itself.

2012

Famous authors from Ukraine

About Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe, known for its expansive wheat fields, forested mountains, Black Sea coastline, and historic cities. The capital, Kyiv, stands along the Dnipro River and is celebrated for its golden-domed churches, ancient monasteries, and distinctive architecture. From the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the fertile plains of the central and southern regions, Ukraine’s landscapes have shaped its agricultural traditions, folklore, and cultural identity. Ukrainian heritage draws on Slavic traditions, Byzantine influences, and centuries of interaction with neighboring European and Eurasian cultures. Ukrainian is the official language, and the country’s music, embroidery, traditional crafts, and seasonal celebrations remain important expressions of national identity. The ongoing Russian invasion has profoundly affected Ukrainian society, cultural heritage, and the lives of millions of people.

Region: Europe

Literary Context

Ukrainian literature has deep roots in medieval chronicles, religious writing, folk songs, and oral epic traditions known as dumy. Poetry and storytelling have played a central role in preserving cultural memory, especially during periods when Ukrainian language and identity faced political restrictions. Modern Ukrainian literature explores freedom, national identity, rural life, social change, exile, and the relationship between individuals and history. Contemporary writers increasingly address war, displacement, resilience, and the emotional cost of conflict. Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s most celebrated poet, helped shape modern Ukrainian literature through works such as Kobzar, combining lyrical poetry with calls for dignity and freedom. Lesya Ukrainka, a major poet and playwright, explored personal courage, oppression, and the struggle for independence in works including The Forest Song. Ivan Franko, a writer, scholar, and political thinker, made significant contributions to poetry, fiction, and literary criticism. In contemporary literature, Serhiy Zhadan, author of The Orphanage and Voroshilovgrad, portrays life in eastern Ukraine amid social upheaval and war. Oksana Zabuzhko, known for Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, examines gender, history, language, and national identity. Together, these writers demonstrate the enduring role of literature in expressing Ukraine’s cultural complexity and documenting its changing historical experience.