Aftershock
Author: Matthew Green
Translator: Iryna Reformator
Aftershock follows the journey of veterans as they return from the battlefield into civilian life, exploring the hidden wounds of war—psychological trauma, moral injury, and the struggle to heal. Green presents vivid narratives of ex-servicemen and women whose return is marked by anguish, guilt, and dislocation, set against the broader evolution of military psychiatry from “shell shock” to modern PTSD. Through rigorous research and empathetic storytelling, Aftershock asks what it means “to survive peace” and calls for a more compassionate response to the long, often invisible cost of war.
Butterflies Under Glass
Author: Iryna Vilde
Translator: Ali Kinsella
Butterflies Under Glass by Iryna Vilde is a beautifully crafted coming-of-age story set in a diverse Ukraine on the brink of change. With warmth and psychological depth, Vilde follows a young girl’s journey toward self-understanding amid friendship, pain, and hope. Her prose recalls the emotional intensity of Elena Ferrante, yet it remains distinctly Ukrainian in its vision of independence and resilience. Long cherished at home, Butterflies Under Glass now reaches English readers as a rediscovered classic of world literature.
Furious Harvests
Author: Alex Averbuch
Translators: Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky
This volume presents the first standalone English translations of a selection of poems by Alex Averbuch, drawn from his acclaimed collection The Jewish King (Kyiv, 2021), which was shortlisted for Ukraine’s Shevchenko National Prize. Averbuch’s work examines the region’s layered history—war, occupation, oppression, displacement—through the lens of personal and family stories. Many poems are rooted in archival “found texts”: letters from Ostarbeiters and Holocaust survivors, preserved in their original dialect and orthographic irregularities, creating a powerful, haunting “poetry of memory.” The volume’s final cycle confronts the current Russo-Ukrainian war, especially in Averbuch’s native Luhansk region, bearing witness to destruction, displacement, and resilience in the present day.
Naissances du totalitarisme
Author: Philippe de Lara
Translator: Dmytro Karatieiv
Naissances du totalitarisme by Philippe de Lara offers a profound exploration of the origins and evolution of totalitarian ideologies in the twentieth century. Through an analysis of communist, fascist, and Nazi revolutions, de Lara reveals how political violence and systems of control take root and sustain themselves. His study sheds light on the mechanisms of fear, propaganda, and conformity that enable such regimes to flourish—and ultimately collapse.
For Ukraine, a nation that endured Soviet totalitarianism and now faces renewed authoritarian aggression, this book carries urgent relevance. It serves as both a historical reflection and a warning, deepening understanding of how democracy can be defended against its most dangerous enemies.
Petrichor: The Scent of the Earth After Rain
Author: Philippe de Lara
Translator: Dmytro Karatieiv
Naissances du totalitarisme by Philippe de Lara offers a profound exploration of the origins and evolution of totalitarian ideologies in the twentieth century. Through an analysis of communist, fascist, and Nazi revolutions, de Lara reveals how political violence and systems of control take root and sustain themselves. His study sheds light on the mechanisms of fear, propaganda, and conformity that enable such regimes to flourish—and ultimately collapse.
For Ukraine, a nation that endured Soviet totalitarianism and now faces renewed authoritarian aggression, this book carries urgent relevance. It serves as both a historical reflection and a warning, deepening understanding of how democracy can be defended against its most dangerous enemies.
Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising
Author: Amelia M. Glaser
Translator: Iaroslava Strikha
Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising explores the life and legacy of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Cossack leader whose 1648 revolt against foreign rule helped shape the Ukrainian nation. Remembered as both a founder and a controversial figure, Khmelnytsky’s image has been reinterpreted for centuries across Ukrainian and Russian narratives. This collection brings together leading scholars to examine how his story has been used to define national identity and political legitimacy—and how those interpretations still resonate amid Russia’s war against Ukraine. Featuring essays by George Grabowicz, Frank Sysyn, Adam Teller, and others, Stories of Khmelnytsky invites readers to view history as a space for reflection, dialogue, and renewed understanding.
The Ladder
Author: Eugenia Kuznetsova
Translators: Alina Senchenko, Donato Mancini
The Ladder by Eugenia Kuznetsova is a moving novel about a Ukrainian family suddenly displaced by Russia’s invasion. Just as the main character buys his dream home in Spain to escape his family, he finds himself hosting them—along with their friends and pets—after the war forces them to flee. In this tender, often humorous, story, Kuznetsova explores how love, tension, and resilience intertwine under the strain of exile and uncertainty. Drawing from her own experience as a refugee living in Spain, she captures both the absurdity and the heartbreak of displacement. Written in clear, compassionate prose, The Ladder offers a deeply human glimpse into the cost of war and the endurance of family ties.
Vortex: Vasyl Stus' Selected Early Poetry
Author: Vasyl Stus
Translators: Bohdan Tokarsky, Nina Murray
Vortex: Vasyl Stus’ Selected Early Poetry is the first professional book-length volume of Stus’ poetry in English translation. The book features more than a decade of Stus’ work, from his earliest texts to the period before his arrest by the KGB in 1972. A book of bold experimentation and virtuoso poetic versatility, Vortex captures Stus’ artistic evolution and the shifting political landscape of the USSR during a crucial period, …
The Ukrainian Intelligentsia and Genocide: The Struggle for History, Language, and Culture in the 1920s and 1930s
Author: Viktoria A. Malko
Translator: Viktoria A. Malko
Viktoria Malko examines the existential threats and ideological choices the Ukrainian intelligentsia faced as the first group targeted during the Holodomor genocide. Due to its influential patriotism and its leadership of Ukraine’s strong tradition of struggle for national liberation, the “brain of the nation”—the intelligentsia —became the epicentre of the Soviet-orchestrated genocide…
Ukraine, the Middle East, and the West
Author: Thomas Prymak
Translator: Nadia Zavorotna
This fascinating and fluidly written book is unique in that it is the first scholarly monograph to treat Ukraine's relations to the world outside eastern Europe. Thomas Prymak addresses geographical knowledge, international travel, political conflicts, historical relations with religiously diverse neighbours, artistic developments, and literary and language contacts to smash…
Solomea: Star of Opera's Golden Age
Author: Andriy Semotiuk
Translator: Halyna Stashkiw
Solomea Krushelnytska was Ukraine's greatest opera star and a leading lyric-dramatic soprano in the Golden Age of opera in the first decade of the 1900s. Known as the soprano who “rescued” Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, her legacy is revered in Ukraine and her life is only now coming to light in Europe and North America. The English-language book, released in 2022,…
The Shore of Expectations: A Cultural Study of the Shistdesiatnyky
Author: Simone Attilio Bellezza
Translator: Marharyta Yehorchenko
Simone Bellezza reconstructs the history of the shistdesiatnyky—the generation of Soviet Ukrainian intellectuals (artists, writers, scientists) who spearheaded the renaissance of Ukrainian national culture in the 1960s. Bellezza’s analysis begins with the awakening of artistic and literary expression during the so-called Soviet Thaw and describes the complex relationship…
The Mobilized
Author: Vlad Yakushev
Translator: Fr Jeffrey D. Stephaniuk
Vlad Yakushev has proven the success of his writing not only by the number of book sales in Ukraine, but also by his prescient and patriotic first-hand involvement in the events he describes. He defended Ukraine in the years before Russia’s full-scale war, and he continues to fight since 2022…
Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with his Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta
Author: Maik Yohansen
Translator: Uilleam Blacker
Italian doctor Leonardo Pazzi and Alceste, his “future lover,” travel through the picturesque, hilly region of Sloboda, near Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, and experience a series of encounters with local Ukrainians and nature itself, with disappearances and transformations that are filled with paradoxes and unmotivated twists…
Dom’s Dream Kingdom
Author: Victoria Amelina
Translator: Grace Mahoney
Victoria Amelina’s award-wining novel, Dom’s Dream Kingdom, prods the complexities of Ukraine’s transition to independence after the Soviet collapse. Following members of the Tsilyk family, who settle in Lviv in the 1990s, the novel unearths their multigenerational ties from Baku to Berlin, while considering the forgotten lives that once inhabited the family’s new apartment…
La dernière volonté du bourreau
Author: Eugenia Kononenko
Translators: Rostyslav Nyemtsev, Felicia Mihali
Eugenia Kononenko’s book masterfully helps the reader travel through the past. Ivan Ivak, the main character of this novel, is both a former writer in the Soviet Union and a KGB employee who puts people to death. After the collapse of communism, he dies under unexplained circumstances, leaving behind a body of second-rate literary work that no one reads…
Darlings of Justice
Author: Yuri Andrukhovych
Translator: Vitaly Chernetsky
Darlings of Justice is the sixth novel by Yuri Andrukhovych, a leading contemporary Ukrainian author. Subtitled “a parahistorical novel in eight and a half episodes,” the book marked Andrukhovych’s long-awaited return to plot-driven narrative prose from works in a more essayistic mode. The entire novel is closely linked to Ukraine. As a result, it can be read as a powerful meditation on the puzzles and …
Road to Asmara
Author: Serhiy Synhaivsky
Translator: Ksenia Maryniak
In the words of Ukrainian writer, Oksana Zabuzhko: “Road to Asmara is the best book written in Ukrainian in the past decade. This book has a great future not only because it’s well written. It is essentially the first Ukrainian viewpoint on the history of the Soviet Union’s colonial wars in the 20th century. It has yet to reach the wider public, with the exception of the no-nonsense men who were forced into Soviet Army duty, if not in Afghanistan then other military arenas…
In Isolation. Dispatches from Occupied Donbas
Author: Stanislav Aseyev
Translator: Lidia Wolanskyj
In this exceptional collection of dispatches from occupied Donbas, writer and journalist Stanislav Aseyev details the internal and external changes observed in the cities of Makiïvka and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
Ivan and Phoebe
Author: Oksana Lutsyshyna
Translator: Nina Murray
"Ivan and Phoebe" won Ukraine’s Taras Shevchenko National Prize for Literature in 2021. The novel chronicles the lives of several young people involved in the Revolution on the Granite in 1990.