Books like Grey Bees — picked by fans

“I ask for freedom for my book.” This was the plea the Ukrainian-Jewish writer and war correspondent Vassily Grossman sent to Premier Nikita Khrushchev after the manuscript of his novel, Life and Fate, was confiscated by the KGB.

Set during the Battle of Stalingrad, Life and Fate (in the tradition of Tolstoy) follows an enormous cast of soldiers, scientists, prisoners, bureaucrats, mothers, and children whose lives intersect as Grossman moves seamlessly from freezing trenches and shattered apartment blocks to extermination camps, interrogation rooms, and laboratories haunted by political fear.

What made the book unforgivable to Soviet censors was Grossman’s daring choice to portray Stalinism and Nazism not as ideological opposites, but as terrifying reflections of one another. Both are regimes built upon fear, conformity, and the crushing of individual freedom. Few books convey so powerfully both the scale of historical horror and the stubborn endurance of human dignity.

Life… show more.

I loved this beautifully written novel which embraces and honours the Ukrainian spirit. It is 1942 and the Germans have arrived in a small town in Western Ukraine. When the schoolmaster and his wife are rounded up and murdered along with all the other Jews, Yaisa, a local peasant girl, instinctively hides their two young sons away. The massacre is witnessed with horror both by a Ukrainian Auxiliary, now remorseful at having joined the German police, and by a German engineer who is building roads with forced Ukrainian labour. Now the hunt is on for the Jewish boys – and for Yaisa too. An incredibly moving read that both hones in on one small town and pans out across the vast and varied landscape of Ukraine. 

Bloodlands is a story about the dead. Using archives made available after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Mr. Snyder sheds light on both Stalin’s and Hitler’s brutality.

In a confined area that includes just eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic countries, 14 million civilians died from the 1930s to the end of the war. Most were either starved or shot. Even more startling were the plans to kill millions more.

Stalin said, “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” Mr. Snyder reminds us of the tragedy.

One of the most beautiful and devastating books I’ve ever read, Chernobyl Prayer relates the story of the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine from the point of view of those most closely involved. Nobel laureate Alexievich’s unique method of using verbatim witness accounts, which she edits into something closely resembling poetry, elevates this to the level of great literature. The Soviet government’s attempts to cover up the scale of the disaster are widely considered to have contributed to the final collapse of the Soviet Union.

I loved this highly readable history of Ukraine. Written in the early 1990s, when I too worked in Ukraine, Borderland begins with the newly independent nation’s struggle to build itself a national identity. Reid captures this time and its people so well – the peasant women in the covered market, the old men playing chess in Independent Square. Ukraine is literally translated as, ‘on the edge’ or ‘borderland’ and Reid explores the toll of its history – pograms, famine, purges, war, Holocaust, and Chernobyl… She travels through villages of whitewashed cottages, bringing their hardy inhabitants to life with her often quirky observations. She meets old folk who were alive during the famine of 1932/33, others who survived the gas chambers. At every turn, the magnificent Ukrainian spirit is in vibrant evidence. 

I read this book as research for my own novel and found it an incredibly moving fictional account of one Jewish Ukrainian boy’s survival in WWII. Yar means ‘ravine’ and, in 1941, over the course of just two days, 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were lined up by German occupiers on the edge of Babi Yar outside Kyiv and machine-gunned, falling then into their mass grave. His whole family is murdered, but eighteen-year-old Solomon somehow survives this horror and escapes to the north of Kyiv, where he falls in with a group of Jewish partisans. Their mission is to destroy Nazis and to ensure the survival of Jews and Judaism. Hiding out in a dense forest, they subsist only with the selfless help of a non-Jewish Ukrainian couple and a Catholic priest. 

For me, this engaging memoir of a Ukrainian who fought in WWII reads like a personal diary, such is the informality of Wenger’s skillful storytelling. In 1943, at the tender age of 20, he was forced from his village into the German Baudienst (building service). Conditions were miserable and when the Ukrainian Division was recruiting soldiers, he joined up, German uniform and all. Hunger, bitter cold, and flea-ridden beds were mild endurances compared to other horrors he experienced; early on, he was forced to witness a mass execution of Jews, later to join a firing squad against his friends. Wenger finally ended up in a British POW camp in Scotland, then married and settled in the UK. This incredible man turned 99 in February 2022, the day before Russia invaded Ukraine. 

A magisterial account of the brutal system of labour camps to which hundreds of thousands of people were consigned as criminals by the Soviet state. Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov offer us vivid first-hand accounts of the experience of being a prisoner in the gulag, but what Applebaum has achieved is to tell the history of an entire system without ever losing sight of the individuals who were its victims.

I enjoyed this book because it presents escapism, pure and simple. The story is much like the James Bond books and movies. Lots of violence and sex. Maybe it will someday be made into a movie.

I liked that the protagonist is a Ukrainian American woman. The author makes her very resourceful but somewhat jaded and sarcastic about everything. I found this to be a short, fun read.

I love this book of poetry because there is no question that once you start reading it in Ukrainian or in English translation, you are aware that it is by a genius.

No person I know would have the knowledge of human relationships, national character, historical insight, and vocabulary to present such a forceful account of the Ukrainian culture, mind, and traditions. I felt that I learned much more about my own background than had I read libraries full of books, volumes of newspapers, or watched thousands of YouTube videos.

I had to stick with it many times, but the journey was well worth it. I felt that I was reading the Bible of Ukraine—but it explains the story of a people, pointing fingers where necessary.