Ukraine, 1941. War has ripped Katya’s country and heart in two. When her first love and the father of her child, a young Hungarian soldier, is killed in battle she thinks her heart couldn’t break any more. But when...

Hugo is the child in this book,set in the early 1940s. The Jews of Chernivtsi have been concentrated in a ghetto and some, including Hugo’s father, have been deported to labour camps. Hugo’s Mother – in order to save...

In nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, Jewish life was ruled by Hasidic rebbes or the traditional Mitnagdim, and religious law dictated every aspect of daily life. Secular books were forbidden; independent thinkers were threatened with moral rebuke, magical retribution, and expulsion....

Marital troubles? Sick of life? Suicide the answer? Why not get yourself a contract killer? Nothing easier, provided you communicate only by phone and box number. You give him your photograph, specify when and where to find you, then...

In pursuit of her Master’s degree in Imperial Russian History, 24 year-old Molly Abramovitz is heading to Moscow for a week long seminar. Never one to miss an opportunity for genealogical research; methodical and meticulous Molly plans a side...

“Will someone pay for the spilled blood? No. Nobody.” When Mikhail Bulgakov composed this dark and prophetic phrase in Kiev amid the turmoil of the Russian civil war, the political troubles of his native Ukraine were well underway, but...

Centre of the first great Slav civilisation in the tenth century, then divided between warring neighbours for a millennium, Ukraine finally won independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Tiring of their own corrupt governments, Ukrainians have since...

For fans of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Umberto Eco Vodolazkin’s new novel Brisbane is “a sophisticated and frequently moving study in dissonance, dedicated to pointing out contrasts between art and life, beauty and decay, intention and outcome. And, yes, between Ukraine and...

In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. While officials tried to hush up the...

The gripping story of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, from an acclaimed historian and writer On the morning of 26 April 1986 Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power...