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A genre-bending anti-memoir from inside Ukraine
In seventeen tales, Sasha Dovzhyk evokes and documents the lives of Ukrainians transformed by Russia’s war. She speaks with everyday citizens, from weavers making camouflage netting to librarians turned combatants, and documents the collapse of rural towns and the threat to Ukrainian traditions.
Blending lived experience with the folklore of a culture under siege, Dovzhyk chronicles the war in Ukraine through the lens of fable, and asks with devastating clarity: when faced with brutality, what do we become?
‘Raging, tender and utterly singular, Sasha … fuses fairytales to memoir and passionate argument to create an extraordinary lightning bolt of a book’
Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian
‘Dovzhyk is fighting language in her book … fighting easy polemical highs, fighting readymade forms of witnessing and testifying, fighting the nonfiction tics and tricks, so as to approach Toni Morrison’s vision of language as “an act with consequences’’’
Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic, Fitzcarraldo
‘Sasha Dovzhyk’s spellbinding, elegant book, comes to us as a voice for a generation … she knows tales can save, and words can ensure a people “is not destined to forgetfulness”’
Natalie Nougayrède, The Guardian
Contents
White Pebbles: An introduction to the three parts of this book
Part I: The End of the World
Zaporizhzhian Knights
Girl with the Mariupol Tattoo
The Coats of Nettle
Shapeshifters
The End of the World
Part II: Once Upon a Time in Ukraine
Little Red Riding Hood from Bucha
The Mitten of Berry Village
The City on the Edge
Rolling-Pea and the Problem with Surviving a Genocide
Russian Petals
A Wood-Nymph House
Part III: Happily Never After
Happily Never After
A Spell for Hunger
The Giant Called Khortytsia
Bookworm / Swordsman
Scheherazade Goes to Izium
Afterword