No Country for Love

’A captivating sweep of a novel about love, resilience and impossible choices’ Christina Lamb, chief foreign correspondent Sunday Times

’An unflinching look at the cost of survival in terrible circumstances, which has sad echoes in modern-day Ukraine’ The Times

Seventeen-year-old Debora Rosenbaum, ambitious and in love with literature, arrives in the capital of the new Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Kharkiv. 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.

But Debora’s prospects - and Ukraine’s - soon dim. State-induced famine rolls through the depleted countryside, and any deviation from Moscow ideology is punished by disappearance. When Samuel is sentenced to ten years’ hard labour, Debora is left on her own with a baby. As advancing Nazi armies move through Ukraine, 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 - while she tries to protect those she loves most.

’Doctor Zhivago meets Stalingrad - a mix of romantic historical fiction and gritty, reportage-like storytelling... The history is spot-on, going from pre-Communist times, through World War II, to the era of Stalin and after. And the stories it tells of the human heart, through the eyes of its heroine Debora Rosenbaum and those who befriend or betray her, are unforgettable’ NPR Best Books of the Year

Yaroslav Trofimov was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and, after a childhood in Madagascar and adolescence in New York, has worked all over the world for the Wall Street Journal, where he serves as the chief foreign-affairs correspondent. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting in 2022 and in 2023, among many other honours, he is one of the pre-eminent war correspondents of our time and the author of three books of narrative non-fiction. This is his first novel.