No Country for Love

'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

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.

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.