{"title":"Books by Serhiy Zhadan","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780300243017","title":"The Orphanage – A Novel","description":"A devastating story of the struggle of civilians caught up in the conflict in eastern Ukraine  Chosen as one of “Six Books to Read for Context on Ukraine” by the New York Times  Selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the “20 Best Books of 2021”  “Powerful . . . For those who want a glimpse of what life will be like in Ukraine for years to come, The Orphanage offers a frightening glimpse.”—Bill Marx, Arts Fuse   If every war needs its master chronicler, Ukraine has Serhiy Zhadan, one of Europe’s most promising novelists. Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling of A Farewell to Arms, The Orphanage is a searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. When hostile soldiers invade a neighboring city, Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian language teacher, sets out for the orphanage where his nephew Sasha lives, now in occupied territory. Venturing into combat zones, traversing shifting borders, and forging uneasy alliances along the way, Pasha realizes where his true loyalties lie in an increasingly desperate fight to rescue Sasha and bring him home.      Written with a raw intensity, this is a deeply personal account of violence that will be remembered as the definitive novel of the war in Ukraine.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56232214004085,"sku":"9780300243017","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300243017_cba26c22-f29e-42e1-ba67-c9f263f90b62.jpg?v=1786012281"},{"product_id":"9780300223361","title":"What We Live For, What We Die For – Selected Poems","description":"An introduction to an original poetic voice from eastern Ukraine with deep roots in the unique cultural landscape of post-Soviet devastation  “This collection of Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan’s poems will likely cement his reputation as the unflinching witness to the turbulent social and political travails of his nation. With an acerbic tone that will seem familiar to admirers of Franz Wright or Charles Bukowski, Zhadan’s no-nonsense verses are sure to strike more than a few nerves.”—World Literature Today  “A startling collection of verse.”—Askold Melnyczuk, Times Literary Supplement   “Everyone can find something, if they only look carefully,” reads one of the memorable lines from this first collection of poems in English by the world-renowned Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan. These robust and accessible narrative poems feature gutsy portraits of life on wartorn and poverty-ravaged streets, where children tally the number of local deaths, where mothers live with low expectations, and where romance lives like a remote memory. In the tradition of Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, Zhadan creates a new poetics of loss, a daily crusade of testimonial, a final witness of abandoned lives in a claustrophobic universe where “every year there’s less and less air.” Yet despite the grimness of these portraits, Zhadan’s poems are familiar and enchanting, lit by the magic of everyday detail, leaving readers with a sense of hope, knowing that the will of a people “will never let it be \/ like it was before.”","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56233178333557,"sku":"9780300223361","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300223361_4af8abf0-aa9e-4bd8-9dbe-d51a3eade556.jpg?v=1786012148"},{"product_id":"9780674292017","title":"A Harvest Truce – A Play","description":"Brothers Anton and Tolik reunite at their family home to bury their recently deceased mother. An otherwise natural ritual unfolds under extraordinary circumstances: their house is on the front line of a war ignited by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Isolated without power or running water, the brothers’ best hope for success and survival lies in the declared cease fire—the harvest truce. But such hopes are swiftly dashed, as it becomes apparent that the conflagration of war will not abate.   With echoes of Waiting for Godot, Serhiy Zhadan’s A Harvest Truce stages a tragicomedy in which the commonplace experiences of death, birth, and the cycles of life marked by the practices of growing and harvesting food are rendered futile and farcical in the wake of the indifferent juggernaut of war.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56292934123893,"sku":"9780674292017","price":16.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674292017_fdd873bf-a756-4178-80a9-3ab4ba5e3adf.jpg?v=1786014565"},{"product_id":"9781941920305","title":"Voroshilovgrad","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"Trainspotting set against a grim post-Soviet backdrop.\" — \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNewsweek\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eWorld Literature Today\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e's Recommended Summer Reads 2016\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA city-dwelling executive heads home to take over his brother's gas station after his mysterious disappearance, but all he finds at home are mysteries and ghosts. The bleak industrial landscape of now-war-torn eastern Ukraine sets the stage for \u003ci\u003eVoroshilovgrad\u003c\/i\u003e, the Soviet era name of the Ukranian city of Luhansk, mixing magical realism and exhilarating road novel in poetic, powerful, and expressive prose.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eSerhiy Zhadan\u003c\/b\u003e, one of the key figureheads in contemporary Ukrainian literature and the most famous poet in the country, has become the voice of Ukraine's \"Euro-Maidan\" movement. He lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56313207980405,"sku":"9781941920305","price":14.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781941920305_236afd55-954c-4de6-a2c8-fe508204cd98.jpg?v=1786030227"},{"product_id":"9780300284348","title":"Arabesques – New Stories","description":"From an acclaimed Ukrainian author, snapshots of a city haunted by war The women, men, and children in Serhiy Zhadan’s new collection of stories testify to the dignity of daily life in the war-battered Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Through a series of powerful vignettes we witness the ordinary experiences of people in extraordinary times—weddings, love affairs, tense visits home from the battlefield, desperate deliveries of humanitarian aid.   Highlighting the upheaval since the 2022 Russian invasion, characters from Zhadan’s Mesopotamia and The Orphanage reappear, this time with entirely different concerns: evacuating an elderly woman after the bombardment of a residential area; finding a job for someone who returned from the front with significant disabilities; attending the funeral of a colleague who had led a combat unit on the front lines.   These stories, composed shortly before the author joined the Ukrainian armed forces, give voice to the vulnerability of those whose lives have been transformed by war, who have come to accept that death lurks around every corner, in every building, and on every square.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56367957148021,"sku":"9780300284348","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300284348.jpg?v=1791212832"},{"product_id":"sky-above-kharkiv-dispatches-from-the-ukrainian-front","title":"Sky Above Kharkiv – Dispatches from the Ukrainian Front","description":"From Ukraine's leading writer-activist comes an intimate account of resistance and survival in the earliest months of the Russian-Ukrainian war   \"A vivid, in-the-trenches report from a Ukrainian city and its 'injured, yet unbreakable' citizens.\"-Kirkus Reviews   When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Serhiy Zhadan took to social media to coordinate a network of resistance workers and send messages of courage to his fellow Ukrainians. What began as a local organizing effort exploded onto the international stage as readers around the globe looked to Zhadan as a key eyewitness documenting Russian atrocities.      In this powerful record of the war's harrowing first four months, Zhadan works day and night in Kharkiv to evacuate children and the elderly from suburbs that have come under fire. He sends lists of life-saving medications to the West in the hopes of procuring them for civilians, coordinates food deliveries, collects money for military equipment, and organizes concerts. He shares photographs of the open sky-grateful for every pause in the shelling-and captures images of beloved institutions reduced to rubble. We'll restore everything. We'll rebuild everything, he writes.      As the days pass, the city empties. Friends are killed. And when images of the Bucha massacre are released, Zhadan's own voice falters: I'm speechless. Hang in there, my friends. Tomorrow, we'll wake up one day closer to our victory. An intimate work of witness literature, this book is at once the testimony of one man entering a new reality and the story of a society fighting for the right to exist.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57466780418421,"sku":"9780300270860","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300270860.jpg?v=1785654842"},{"product_id":"how-fire-descends","title":"How Fire Descends – New and Selected Poems","description":"A searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, from iconic writer-activist Serhiy Zhadan   Finalist for the PEN America Literary Award for Poetry in Translation   “Reading these words now is enough to make one’s breath catch. [Ukraine’s western partners] do not see themselves as members of its funeral processions; they do not routinely line the streets and kneel before passing coffins.”—Linda Kinstler, Times Literary Supplement   Since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan has brought international attention to his country’s struggle through his unflinching poetry of witness. In this searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, Zhadan honors the memory of the lost and addresses the living, inviting us to consider what language can offer to a country threatened with extinction. Young lovers, marginalized outsiders, and ordinary citizens pulse with life in a composite portrait of a people newly unified by extremity. Even in the midst of enemy fire, Zhadan’s lyrical monuments, forged entirely in wartime, beat with a subterranean thrum of hope.      Translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, and with a foreword by the poet Ilya Kaminsky, this selection of Zhadan’s poetry is an homage to the Ukrainian people, a forceful reckoning with the violence of the past and present, and an act of artistic imagination that breaks with trauma and charts a new future for Ukraine.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57466790084981,"sku":"9780300272468","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300272468.jpg?v=1785654852"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-serhiy-zhadan.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}