Pioneer Summer

This star-crossed gay romance is a #1 bestselling TikTok sensation that took readers by storm, made international news, and catalyzed one of Russia’s largest-ever crackdowns on LGBTQ representation.

Cowritten by a Ukrainian-Russian duo, Pioneer Summer reached such heights of popularity that Putin stepped in to ban it. Now this swoony romance will transport American readers to another place and time and introduce them to one of the most memorable relationships of their lives.

The year is 1986, and Yurka Konev, 16, has been sent off for another summer at Pioneer Camp. Impulsive, forthright, and unfairly branded as a troublemaker, he anticipates the weeks ahead of him with boredom and dread.

But when he’s pushed into working on the camp’s theater production, he meets serious, thoughtful troop leader Volodya. Yurka finds himself drawn to the slightly older boy, and, surprisingly, Volodya seems to like him, too. The two boys grow closer and closer, and though both fear the consequences of their illegal attraction, its gravity pulls them together.

Now, 20 years later, Yury returns to the abandoned camp to reminisce on the relationship that changed his life forever--and discovers that not all history is destined to remain in the past.

Katerina Sylvanova was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. She graduated from Kharkiv National Agrarian University and later moved to the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, where she worked in a shoe store and spent her free time writing. Elena Malisova was born in a provincial Soviet town in the late 1980s, where she lived until she moved to Moscow in the late 2000s. Growing up, she wrote poems that were published in small local newspapers. Sylvanova and Malisova met in 2016 and together began working on Summer in a Pioneer Tie. Both authors left Russia in 2022 after a flurry of death threats, with Sylvanova returning to Ukraine and Malisova moving to Germany.