Books from Ukraine
65 popular ukrainian books
Travel the world without leaving your chair.
The target of the Read Around The World Challenge is to read at least one book written by an author from each and every country in the world.
All books that are listed here as part of the "Read Around Europe Challenge" were written by authors from Ukraine.
Find a great book for the next part of your reading journey around the world from this book list. The following popular books have been recommended so far.
11.
Depeche Mode by Serhiy Zhadan EN
Description:
In 1993, tragic turbulence takes over Ukraine in the post-communist spin-off. As if in somnambulism, Soviet war veterans and upstart businessmen listen to an American preacher of whose type there were plenty at the time in the post-Soviet territory. In Kharkiv, the young communist headquarters is now an advertising agency, and a youth radio station brings Western music, with Depeche Mode in the lead, into homes of ordinary people. In the middle of this craze three friends, an anti-Semitic Jew Dogg Pavlov, an unfortunate entrepreneur Vasia the Communist and the narrator Zhadan, nineteen years o... continue
12.
Diaboliad by Mikhail Bulgakov EN
Description:
The five, irreverant, satirical and imaginative stories contained in Diaboliad caused an uproar upon the book's first publication in 1925. Full of invention, they display Bulgakov's breathtaking stylistic range, moving at dizzying speed from grotesque satire to science fiction, from the plainest realism to the most madcap fantasy. Diaboliad is a wonderful introduction to literature's most uncategorisable and subversive genius.
13.
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories: The Nose; the Carriage; the Overcoat; Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol EN
Description:
Hailed by Nabokov as "the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced," Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) left his mark as a playwright, novelist, and writer of short stories. Gogol's works remain popular with both writers and readers, who prize his originality, imaginative gifts, and sheer exuberance.
This collection offers an excellent introduction to the author's works. Opening a door to his bizarre world of broad comedy, fantasy, and social commentary, the title story portrays a petty official's mental disintegration as he struggles for the attention of the woman he love... continue
14.
Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker by Joseph Roth DE
Description:
his book, one of the most haunting things that Roth ever composed, was published in 1939, the year the author died. Like Andreas, the hero of the story, Roth drank himself to death in Paris, but this is not an autobiographical confession. It is a secular miracle-tale, in which the vagrant Andreas, after living under bridges, has a series of lucky breaks that lift him briefly onto a different plane of existence. The novella is extraordinarily compressed, dry-eyed and witty, despite its melancholic subject-matter.
16.
Doce anillos by Yuri Andrujovich ES
Description:
Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen, fotógrafo austriaco con raíces galitzianas, viaja buscando sus orígenes a la Ucrania de los años noventa del siglo xx. Tras el derrumbe del imperio soviético, encuentra un estado en el que los desajustes por su nacimiento serpentean entre el nacionalismo, la nostalgia por los Habsburgo, la tentación del retorno al régimen anterior, el folklore y el embrutecimiento vulgar de un mercado sin control. Enamorado de su intérprete, viaja con ella a un antiguo observatorio, que, tras ser un centro de espionaje y un complejo deportivo soviético, es hoy un hotel en los Cárpatos. ... continue
17.
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Stefanivna Zabuz︠h︡ko EN
Description:
Called "the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence," Oksana Zabuzhko's Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex became an international phenomenon when it shot to number one on the Ukrainian bestseller list and remained there throughout the 1990s. The novel is narrated in first-person streams of thought by a sharp-tongued poet with an irreverently honest voice. She is visiting professor of Slavic studies at Harvard and her exposure to American values and behaviors conspires with her yearning to break free from Ukrainian conventions. In her despair over a recently ended affair, she ... continue
18.
Fire in the Blood by Irene Nemirovsky EN
Description:
From the celebrated author of the international bestseller Suite Française, a newly discovered novel, a story of passion and long-kept secrets, set against the background of a rural French village in the years before World War II.Written in 1941, Fire in the Blood – only now assembled in its entirety – teems with the intertwined lives of an insular French village in the years before the war, when "peace" was less important as a political state than as a coveted personal condition: the untroubled pinnacle of happiness. At the center of the novel is Silvio, who has returned to this small town af... continue
19.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad EN
Description:
In this reprinting of the great Conrad classic, Green Integer presents his tale of white colonialism and the effects of the African world on European self-satisfaction. Marlow's tale of his voyage through the Congo and the legends surround a previous explorer-adventurer named Kurtz gradually reveal the dark horros of both the Western impact on Africa and its effects on Western civilisation. Conrad's tale is a brilliant symbolic work as well as a great adventure story. The book, one of the true classics of 20th century literature endures as a favourite to this day.
20.
Klotsvog by Margarita Khemlin EN
Description:
Klotsvog is a novel about being Jewish in the Soviet Union and the historical trauma of World War II--and it's a novel about the petty dramas and demons of one strikingly vain woman. Maya Abramovna Klotsvog has had quite a life, and she wants you to know all about it. Selfish, garrulous, and thoroughly entertaining, she tells us where she came from, who she didn't get along with, and what became of all her husbands and lovers. In Klotsvog, Margarita Khemlin creates a first-person narrator who is both deeply self-absorbed and deeply compelling. From Maya's perspective, Khemlin unfurls a retelli... continue