No Country for Love
Abacus (Little, Brown Book Group), 2024.
"A bracing new novel... uses the tumult to frame a central question: can love bear the weight of constant tragedy? Mr Trofimov is particularly perceptive in showing how the darkness of totalitarian rule seeps into the deepest crevices." - The Economist
Seventeen-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 become part of Ukraine's new cultural elite.
But Debora'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. Debora 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.
Reviews:
“More than a historic novel because what it tells us about yesterday is a lesson for today."
― Corriere della Sera
“Doctor Zhivago meets Stalingrad -- a mix of romantic historical fiction and gritty, reportage-like storytelling... The story across decades of impossible love, war and survival rings painfully and beatifully true... Unforgettable."
― NPR
"An unflinching look at the cost of survival in terrible circumstances, which has echoes in modern-day Ukraine."
― The Times
“The novel, which tells the story of Debora, a young Jewish woman in Stalinist Ukraine, often reads -- in the best sense -- like reportage: it's a well-researched story brought to life by a skilled correspondent who not only has clearly seen his share of world conflicts but also understands what the drive to survive does to the human psyche."
― Los Angeles Review of Books
"Compelling and unsentimental... Above all, it's a love letter to Ukraine and its people's resilience."
― Irish Times
“Journalistic precision translates effortlessly into fiction, with each chapter unfolding like a meticulously crafted dispatch, devoid of any superfluous elements."
― Kyiv Independent
“At a time when many people are scrambling to understand Ukraine, No Country for Love gives us the story of the country's painful twentieth century as a sweeping romantic epic. It links the personal and the political in a way that cuts through wartime propaganda, restoring both human scale and moral complexity.”
― Hari Kunzru
“Yaroslav Trofimov delivers a literary epic taking place on the "bloodlands" -- to borrow the title from Timothy Snyder's book -- scarred by the Nazi and Stalinist atrocities. It is an expansive novel reminiscent of the literary breath, the humanity, and the historical density found in Vassili Grossman's Life and Fate.”
― Christophe Boltanski, winner of the 2015 Femina Prize for The Safe House
"Tough, lean, and unsentimental, No Country for Love is a powerful moral testament that reads like a thriller, as its impressive heroine learns to do what is necessary, day by day, in order to endure one of the most harrowing passages of the 20th century. It is also an unsparing account of the tribulations of ordinary Ukrainians, from the Holomodor, through the horrors of World War II, to the death of Stalin. By turns terrifying, tender, and inspiring, this gripping and necessary novel illuminates the origins of a story whose latest chapters are being played out before the world even today."
― James Hynes, author of Next and Sparrow
"A captivating sweep of a novel about love, resilience and impossible choices in a Ukraine caught between Soviets and Nazism and riven by war - I loved it!"
― Christina Lamb, chief foreign correspondent, Sunday Times
“A beautiful, important and timely rendering of Jewish life in Ukraine through the travails of the 20th century. Both historical and page-turning.”
― Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends and Super Sad True Love Story
"A chilling account of what it means to live under a totalitarian regime. With the sharp pen of an award-winning journalist and the tender heart of a poet, Yaroslav Trofimov has woven an exquisite and enduring tale of survival, courage, and resistance. Epic yet intimate, heart-breaking yet hopeful, terrifying yet inspiring, No Country for Love is a love letter to Ukraine and a gift to anyone who appreciates peace."
― Nguyen Phan Que Mai, internationally best-selling author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child
“A family saga like no other... Fast-paced and rich in historical detail, 'No Country for Love' vividly portrays its era."
― Moscow Times
“Trofimov depicts the relentless assertion of humanity in the most inhumane of circumstances... It's a virtue of this novel that the reader can drop the historical analogies and immerse in each moment."
― Brooklyn Rail
“Compulsively readable, invaluably informative and insightful, and often powerfully moving."
― The Arts Fuse
“In a fresco that that recounts more than twenty years of history, we see through the eyes of the heroine the terror of the purges, the fall of Kyiv to the Nazis, the battle of Stalingrad and the the destruction of the countryside in the famine of Holodomor, a narrative that is heavy and tragic, and that is unsparing to the heroine and to the reader alike."
― La Stampa
“An engaging historical epic that paints a ruthless portrait of Ukraine under Soviet rule, during the two darkest decades of the country's history."
― Rivista Studio