The Dreamtime

A Kirkus Best Indie Book of the Year & a Library Journal Best World Literature read, from Pulitzer Prize-winning AP Journalist and Director/Producer/Writer of the Academy Award-winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol

＂[A] book for our times--vivid enough to grab us and not let go.＂ -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

＂A powerful psychological thriller about borderline situations in life, hopes and dreams. Written against the backdrop of the war, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the story acquires an additional passionate and humanistic significance.＂ -- Andrey Kurkov, author of Grey Bees

＂[T]his timely novel from a Ukrainian author excels at examining the connection between reality and dreams and exploring the effects of war on the human psyche.＂ -- Library Journal

The Dreamtime is a fusion of documentary and military fiction inspired by the author’s experience as an award-winning war correspondent that offers a unique and gritty point of view on the horrors of war through four intertwining narratives. Parallel storylines from a guilt-ridden doctor trying to exorcise his demons by exposing himself to war; a young woman tending to her ailing father as the bombs fall around them in Russian-occupied Slovyansk; a mysterious sociopath playing a cat-and-mouse game; and a forensic expert solving a murder case while trying to save her marriage with a discharged soldier bring a raw intensity and a deeply personal connection to the effects of war. As the threads of their stories unfurl, through harrowing scenes of personal and collective trauma, an enigmatic pattern emerges.

Shifting from Ukraine’s war-torn Donbas to southern Europe and southeast Asia, The Dreamtime ties together themes of existential conflict, the blurred line between reality and dreams, and how easily the boundary dissolves between waking life and nightmare. Originally published in Kyiv in 2020, The Dreamtime has been well received by critics around the world and praised for its realism in depicting war, for its creative literary depiction of how dreams reflect the psyche, and for its masterly prose.

Mstyslav Chernov is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Ukrainian war correspondent, filmmaker, photographer, and novelist known for his coverage of the Ukrainian revolution, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Nagorno-Karabakh, and Taliban rule in Afghanistan after U.S. withdrawal, as well as for his art installations and exhibitions. Chernov is an Associated Press (AP) journalist and the President of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers (UAPF). In addition to being a finalist for the Livingston Award (2019) for his work on the civil unrest in Belarus and the Rory Peck Award (2017) for his coverage of the Battle of Mosul, he has won several prestigious awards, including two Royal Television Society Awards for his coverage of the downing of flight MH17 (2015; 2016), and the Pulitzer Prize Winner in Public Service (2023), the Georgy Gongadze Prize (2022), the Knight International Journalism Award (2022), the DW Freedom of Speech Award (2022), a Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award (2022), the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism (2022), a Free Media Award (2022), and an Oliver S. Gramling Award (2022) for documenting the siege in Mariupol during the 2022 Russian invasion as one of the few remaining international journalists in that city. Chernov is the director and producer of the AP/FRONTLINE documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, which won the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. He was named Ukrainian Photographer of the Year in 2013 and 2015. He was born in Eastern Ukraine.