The death of Cecil the lion made sense

"The death of Cecil the lion made sense" is a novel by Elena Styazhkina about our war and the fate of people who were accidentally brought together in the Donetsk maternity hospital in 1986. The magic of photography and borrowed names turns strangers into branches of a family tree - and they eventually become a family, the head of which is a little girl. There are many transitions in the book - a dentist becomes a military surgeon, a goat becomes a sapper dog, a cowardly Soviet official becomes a guardian angel, a cosmetics saleswoman turns into a sniper shooting instructor... In the Ukrainian Donbass. At the beginning of the XXI century. However, time in the book is a rather arbitrary quantity.

This is the author's first novel in the Ukrainian language - however, not completely: by design, Ukrainian here is perhaps the most important point of transition, in which a conscious farewell to Russian means for heroes and non-heroes the opportunity to be themselves.