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.
1.
Rating: 3.5 4 Votes
Description:
'Kurkov is hugely talented. Truly very funny' Time Out Marital troubles? Sick of life? Suicide the answer? Why not get yourself a contract killer? Nothing easier, provided you communicate only by phone and box number. You give him your photograph, specify when and where to find you, then sit back and prepare to die. Murdered, you will be of greater interest than ever you were in life. More to him than met the eye will be the judgement. A mysterious killing lives long in the popular memory. Our hero meticulously plans his own demise, except for one detail: what if he suddenly decides he wants t... continue
3.
Rating: 4 2 Votes
Description:
When their recently widowed father announces he plans to remarry, sisters Vera and Nadezhda realise they must put aside a lifetime of feuding in order to save him. His new love is a voluptuous gold-digger from the Ukraine half his age, with a proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, who stops at nothing in her single minded pursuit of the luxury Western lifestyle she dreams of. But the old man, too, is pursuing his eccentric dreams - and writing a history of tractors in Ukrainian. A wise, tender and deeply funny novel about families, the healing of old wounds, the tria... continue
4.
Description:
In this complex novel from the winner of two of Russia's biggest literary prizes, a celebrated guitarist robbed of his talent by Parkinson's disease seeks other paths to immortality. For readers of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Umberto Eco, and Solzhenitsyn, this richly layered new novel from the author of Laurus follows a musical prodigy in search of inner peace as he faces an incurable disease. Like Vodolazkin's earlier novels, this personal story of a lifetime quest for meaning will resonate with any mortal who has grasped for eternity. At fifty, Gleb Yanovski, an acclaimed guitar virtuoso, is diag... continue
5.
Description:
Carbide explores the underbelly of the Ukrainian smuggling industry in a merciless yet loving parody of Ukrainian nationalism.
6.
Rating: 4 31 Votes
Description:
Victor is depressed: his lover has dumped him, his short stories are too short, and the light has gone off in his dingy apartment. His only companion is Misha, the penguin he rescued from Kiev's Zoo, when it couldn't feed the animals anymore. Misha is the silent witness to Victor's despair, and joins in his celebration—fish and vodka—when Victor's luck seems to turn: he is commissioned to write obituaries. The weird thing is that the editor wants him to select subjects who are still alive, the movers and the shakers of the new, post-Communist society.
7.
Rating: 3 1 Vote
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
8.
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
9.
Rating: 1 1 Vote
Description:
Tells the stories of a fearful adolescent, an angry old woman, a dog's burial, a possessive mother and her son, a businessman's dinner, and a French explorer in Africa
10.
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