No Country for Love : ‘an unflinching look at the cost of survival in terrible circumstances’ The Times

No Country for Love is Doctor Zhivago meets Stalingrad – a mix of romantic historical fiction and gritty, reportage-like storytelling… The history is spot-on, going from pre-Communist times, through World War II, to the era of Stalin and after. And the stories it tells of the human heart, through the eyes of its heroine Debora Rosenbaum and those who befriend or betray her, are unforgettable’ NPR Best Books of 2024’A captivating sweep of a novel about love, resilience and impossible choices’ Christina Lamb, chief foreign correspondent Sunday TimesSeventeen-year-old Debora Rosenbaum, ambitious and in love with literature, arrives in the capital of the new Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Kharkiv, to make her own fate as a modern woman. The stale and forbidding ways of the past are out; 1930 is a new dawn, the Soviet era, where skyscrapers go up overnight. Debora 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 mix with Ukraine’s new cultural elite. But Debora’s prospects – and Ukraine’s – soon dim. State-induced famine rolls through the over-harvested countryside, and any deviation from Moscow-dictated ideology is punished by disappearance. When Samuel is sentenced to ten years’ hard labour, Debora is left 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 – while she tries 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.