I Will Die in a Foreign Land
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award
Best Book of the Year - New York Public Library, Cosmopolitan, Independent Book Review
'Pickhart's story is powerful, boldly imaginative, rich in history and feeling, charged with events that have occurred since it was written - and which summon up the same force of the history that compelled an American author to write about this "foreign land".' The Times
2014 Kyiv, Ukraine. The city is poised on a knife-edge as tensions mount around a corrupt government's increasing ties to Russia. As protests erupt across the city, the fates of four individuals come together. Katya is a Ukrainian-American doctor stationed at a makeshift medical clinic treating wounded protesters; Misha is an engineer originally from Pripyat, near Chernobyl, grieving the death of his wife; Slava is a fiery young activist whose past hardships steel her determination; Aleksandr Ivanovich, a former KGB agent, climbs atop a burned-out bus at Independence Square and plays the piano.
In this dazzling, inventive debut novel - set during the 'Revolution of Dignity' - Kalani Pickhart weaves together a rich tapestry of voices to create a moving story about beauty, love and survival during tumultuous times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Pickhart's ardent, sprawling debut, a set of memorable characters attempt to lay bare the truths of recent conflicts in the Ukraine. Among the thousands of demonstrators gathered in Kyiv in 2013 and 2014 to protest Russian interference, the reader meets four whose lives have been shattered by the consequences of their country's tragic history, which until 1991 never once included independence. Katya has fled Boston and a failing marriage to treat Euromaidan protesters in a makeshift triage site at St. Michael's Monastery. While tending to a mortally wounded old Soviet pianist named Aleksandr Ivanovich, she discovers cassette tapes the onetime KGB agent recorded, addressed to his long-lost daughter. Katya also treats Misha Tkachenko, a selfless and courageous engineer from a town near Chernobyl whose wife died of radiation sickness. Misha has returned to the violent streets day after day, looking out for his friend and sometime lover Slava, another protester, blue-haired and fiery. Together their stories, which the author weaves in and out of the novel nonchronologically, create a portrait of the complicated and calamitous region. As Katya and Misha grow closer, Slava meets a doomed journalist with whom she falls in love, and through revelations in Aleksandr's tapes, the reader learns how indelibly connected each of these major characters—and very many minor ones—are. This bighearted novel generously portrays the unforgettable set of characters through their determination to face oppression. It's a stunner.