The Orphanage
A Novel
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
A devastating story of the struggle of civilians caught up in the conflict in eastern Ukraine
“A nightmarish, raw vision of contemporary eastern Ukraine under siege. . . . With a poet’s sense of lyricism . . . [Zhadan] unblinkingly reveals a country’s devastation and its people’s passionate determination to survive.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zhadan (Mesopotamia) presents a nightmarish, raw vision of contemporary eastern Ukraine under siege from Russian-backed separatists. Pasha, a bespectacled teacher with a heart condition and an injured hand, keeps his head down, avoids politics, and just does his job. One January day, he must pick up his nephew from the local orphanage (where his unmarried, stressed-out sister, a railway stewardess, had left the epileptic boy years ago) and bring him home. On the way there, Pasha encounters roads destroyed by shelling, public transportation suspended, utility and cellphone service disrupted, and the train station crowded with stranded women, children, and old men. After reluctantly leading a ragtag assortment of vulnerable people on a dangerous trek back to their neighborhood and an uncertain future, Pasha reaches the orphanage and takes the surprisingly mature 13-year-old on a terrifying trek back home, with constant threats from mortar rounds, automatic-rifle fire, tanks, packs of starving dogs, menacing soldiers, and desperate civilians. With a poet's sense of lyricism, Zhadan employs descriptions of weather and the sky as literal physical challenges but also as powerful metaphors for lack of transparency, justice, and truth, and the translators deserve credit for rendering Zhadan's prose into colloquial English. This unblinkingly reveals a country's devastation and its people's passionate determination to survive.
