Lucky Breaks, Yevgenia Belorusets
Lucky Breaks, Yevgenia Belorusets
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Lucky Breaks

Author: Yevgenia Belorusets, Eugene Ostashevsky

Narrator: Alexandra Cohler

Unabridged: 4 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/22/2022


Synopsis

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.

About Yevgenia Belorusets

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. Lucky Breaks, her first work of fiction, was given a 2020 HKW International Literature Award in Germany.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Joseph

It is a little uncomfortable and yet timely to be reading this collection of stories by Ukrainian photographer, journalist and writer, Yevgenia Belorusets while a full scale invasion of Ukraine is underway. The author’s time documenting the lives of people in the occupied eastern regions of the coun......more

Goodreads review by Jenn

Do yourself a favor and download the Kindle edition — the print is ridiculously small in the paperback (if you can get your hands on one here in the U.S.). Then do yourself another favor, if like me you're an English-edition reader in North America with little knowledge of Ukrainian history, much le......more

Goodreads review by Judy

Somehow I read five books translated from another language in June. This was the fifth. I read it for one of my reading groups as a companion to Isla Kaminsky's poetry collection, Deaf Republic. Reading Ukraine, we are. Lucky Breaks is a short story collection by Ukrainian photographer Yevgenia Belor......more

I enjoyed these little sketches of women in Kyiv and the Donbas region of Ukraine; I wanted to understand more about the world being demolished right now by Putin's war, and maybe this passage was all I needed to read: "You can’t really live in this country – you’re threatened from every side at eve......more