The Orphanage

Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling of A Farewell to Arms, The Orphanage is a searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. When hostile soldiers invade a neighboring city, Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian language teacher, sets out for the orphanage where his nephew, Sasha, lives in occupied territory. Venturing into combat zones, traversing shifting borders, and forging uneasy alliances, Pasha realizes where his true loyalties lie in an increasingly desperate fight to rescue Sasha and bring him home.

Written with a raw intensity, this is a profoundly personal account of the violence that will be remembered as the definitive novel of the war in Ukraine.