Lucky Breaks

Yevgenia Belorusets

£12.95

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New Directions Publishing Corporation
1 March 2022
ISBN: 9780811229845
Paperback
112 pages

From the publisher

Translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky

“Against the present and looming risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Belorusets produces an especially unsettling awareness of the myriad ways in which imagination walks hand in hand with violent reality.”—Bryan Karentnyk, Financial Times

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. She also weaves in twenty-three photographs that, in lyrical and historical counterpoint, form their own remarkable visual narrative.