Ukraine

War rarely starts with invasion-but invasion, devastating though it is, is often the moment when diplomacy gives way to conflict. Sadly, for Ukraine it has marked the start of a long and brutal chapter that has continued since 2022.

With no clear end in sight, Peter Longley's UKRAINE is a sweeping family saga spanning 1900 to the present day. Through the fictional Lemontov-Sokolov family, the story moves from the last years of the Russian Empire into the upheavals of 1905, the revolutions of 1917, the fall of the Tsar, and the civil war that leads to the formation of the USSR, including Soviet Ukraine.

The family then endures the Nazi invasion in the Second World War and the Soviet "liberation" under Stalin, followed by decades of life inside the Soviet system. After 1991, Ukraine becomes independent-but tensions deepen between regions with strong Russian ties (especially Crimea and the Donbas) and the Kyiv-centred west and north, leading to separatist conflict, the 2014 takeover of Crimea, and rising confrontation.

As politics swings between pro-European and pro-Russian directions, the Sokolov family is split-brother against brother-across Kyiv, Kherson, and Sevastopol, until the standoff between Putin and Zelenskyy erupts into full invasion. In the aftermath, family members become refugees scattered across Britain, Germany, and the United States, holding different views of their homeland but sharing the same longing for peace.

"Sofia Sokolov died a refugee in a foreign land, dreaming of that little wooden house... amidst those fields of sunflowers in the Donbas-where blue skies meet a sea of waving yellow."

Ukraine is a twentieth- and twenty-first-century tragedy-told through one family's survival, division, and hope.