Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Yevgenia Belorusets is a Ukrainian writer, journalist, artist and photographer who lives between Kyiv and Berlin. Her photographic work calls attention to the more vulnerable sections of Ukrainian society - queer families, out-of-work coal miners, the Roma people living in the war zone in the East - and was shown in the Ukrainian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. She was awarded the 2020 HKW International Literature Award in Germany for Lucky Breaks, her first work of fiction.Mordant, funny, weird and surprising... I really enjoyed these stories, the sharpness and clarity of their observations, their dark humour, and the glimpses they give of an unfamiliar world
- Marcel Theroux, Guardian
Ukraine's Catch-22... an uncompromising tableau of individuals dislodged by conflict some years before Russia's full-scale invasion... Humour is not a way out for these women, but it does allow the reader a way in... these are stories that stay with you
Telegraph
A daring, unsettling book about displaced women telling luminous stories to survive the darkness that surrounds them
- Jenny Offill, author of 'Weather',
Through Belorusets's lens, small actions and encounters take on the qualities of myth... The effect is rather as if Isaac Babel and the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich had offspring
- Claire Messud, Harper's
Profound narrative absurdities readily evoke the Ukrainian-born Nikolai Gogol's... spellbinding
New York Times
[Lucky Breaks] is a book in Russian about the war in Ukraine that does not describe combat operations and that forbears to generalize in any way... The tender and terrible stories of Yevgenia Belorusets, where bogeyman tales of childhood dress in the language of Jean Genet, and the documentary dilates into the epic, become the history we all have in common
Maria Stepanova, author of 'In Memory of Memory'
This collection of immediate and eccentric stories... presents a series of sideline encounters with Ukrainian women whose lives have been caught up, often imperceptibly, in the Donbas conflict... Lucky Breaks asks essential questions about the ethical implications of blurring the boundary between fiction and reality
Financial Times
Beguiling... haunting, lyrical
Economist
Belorusets, a documentary photographer and activist, captures the extraordinary lives of ordinary Ukrainian women in her arresting fiction debut... powerful
Publishers Weekly
Belorusets is interested in the histories of the defeated, of the unseen and unheard, and above all in the experiences of eastern Ukrainian women in wartime... excruciatingly topical
The Baffler
In Yevgenia Belorusets's collection of short stories, Lucky Breaks, the machine-gun is fired and the mortar explodes, but offstage. Her stories are about anonymous women who trace new existences or disappear in the fog and ruins of the frozen conflict
TLS
Women... find themselves constructing surreal narratives in an attempt to capture the strangeness of living a life under bombardment.
Daily Mail
Belorusets... excels at building stories that serve as striking snapshots of lives... this singular collection brings Ukraine, "the land of residual phenomena," entirely to life. Striking and original.
Kirkus Reviews
In Belorusets' prose - which braids together the real with the phantasmagorical - we find inflections of a common humanity in the smallest of details
The Calvert Journal
In Lucky Breaks, Belorusets is the peerless documentarian of her times, a meticulous stitcher of the incongruities that beset contemporary Ukrainian life
Asymptote
Timely... moving
Independent
A tantalisingly oblique collection... as sharp and fragmentary as the shards of lives upended
Irish Times