Aleksandra

Her ancient grandmother Aleksandra sends a young woman to Ukraine to locate the grave of Kolja, a relative who vanished. She tricks the soldiers guarding the edge of the fighting zone and then drops through time into the Palace of the Soviets, where her great-grandfather Nikolaj guides her through the past like a latter-day Alice. Mixing the fantastic with brutal fact, the novel revives a hundred years of Ukrainian upheaval: famine and frost, bravery and hopelessness, a forebear who kills his horse to stay alive, and a man in the Donbas who will not leave his abandoned dogs behind.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

347 pages in the original

Genres

Family, War, Historical (assigned by AI)

Set in

Ukraine

First published

2021 by De Bezige Bij

Author's age

32 when first published

ISBN

9789403130811 (original)