Lucky Breaks

Powerful, off-beat stories about women living in the shadow of the now-frozen, now-thawing war in Ukraine

Out of the impoverished coal regions of Ukraine known as the Donbass, where Russian secret military intervention coexists with banditry and insurgency, the women of Yevgenia Belorusets's captivating collection of stories emerge from the ruins of a war, still being waged on and off, ever since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Through a series of unexpected encounters, we are pulled into the ordinary lives of these anonymous women: a florist, a cosmetologist, card players, readers of horoscopes, the unemployed, and a witch who catches newborns with a mitt. One refugee tries unsuccessfully to leave her broken umbrella behind as if it were a sick relative; a private caregiver in a disputed zone saves her elderly charge from the angel of death; a woman sits down on International Women's Day and can no longer stand up; a soldier decides to marry war. Belorusets threads these tales of ebullient survival with a mix of humor, verisimilitude, the undramatic, and a profound Gogolian irony.

©2018 Yevgenia Belorusets; Translation copyright 2022 by Eugene Ostashevsky (P)2022 Tantor

Lucky Breaks

Rare street level introduction to country at war. Wide variety of colorful, determined and memorable protagonists.

Insightful stories about Ukrainian women

This book is written by a photographer who wrote these fictional, offbeat and illuminating stories about people from the Donbas who either fled to Kyiv to escape the war or found themselves in a variety of other circumstances affected by the war. If you go to Belorusets's Website, you can see many of her photographs and get a sense of the environments in which these stories arose. I loved this book, and hope she writes more.