The Orphanage

A young teacher plans on bringing his 13-year-old nephew home from the boarding school at the other end of town. The school, in which his working sister has »parked« her son, has come under fire and no longer offers security. Crossing the town, in which civil life has broken down, takes a whole day.

The return trip becomes a test. The two of them find themselves in the immediate vicinity of the fighting without being able to see further than the milky fog ablaze with yellow fires. There’s the rat-a-tat of machine guns, exploding mines, more frequently than the day before. Paramilitary troops, ownerless dogs appear in the ruins, apathetic people are stumbling through an apocalyptic urban landscape confused and disoriented.

With incredibly powerful images, Serhiy Zhadan describes how a once familiar environment turns into an eerie setting. His art of telling the stories of defiant people who counter fear and destruction with their assertiveness and their sense of responsibility is at least equally as striking. His examination of the war in the Donbass finds its preliminary culmination in his novel The Orphanage.

»More, perhaps, than any other writer from the post-Soviet era, Serhiy Zhadan speaks to this experience of national and personal upheaval [...] Zhadan gives us a flâneur’s perspective on post-Soviet urban life, with its ruined socialist architecture, industrial wastelands, petty crime and violence. The absurdity of the clash of socialist and Western culture is also sharply observed.« The Times Literary Supplement

»Zhadan’s extraordinary novel exists in a zone of fracture and obliteration – not merely portraying the physical landscape of war, but the effects that ongoing conflict has on lives and minds.« Alex Clark, juror of the EBRD Literature Prize 2022

»Powerful … For those who want a glimpse of what life will be like in Ukraine for years to come, The Orphanage offers a frightening glimpse.« Bill Marx, Arts Fuse

»A nightmarish, raw vision of contemporary eastern Ukraine under siege. [...] With a poet’s sense of lyricism [Zhadan] unblinkingly reveals a country’s devastation and its people’s passionate determination to survive.« Publishers Weekly, starred review

»Zhadan captures the grim war-torn city experience very well [...] In its basis in real-life conditions that are so close to us, in time and place, [The Orphanage] serves well as a solid, all-too-close-for-comfort picture of how quickly societal collapse can ripple through even safe-seeming harbors, a reminder of how near such situations might be, to all of us.« M. A. Orthofer, Complete Review

»Compelling. … Zhadan refuses to speak the language of a propagandist: above all, he is interested in how the war has transformed the lives of everyday people – that is, the most innocent and vulnerable in Ukrainian society.« Kate Tsurkan, Asymptote

»[Ukraine] has been embroiled in bloody conflict since 2014. … With The Orphanage, this war finds its bard in Serhiy Zhadan, one of Ukraine’s most interesting and talented writers.« Michael Idov, Book Post

»Masterfully written, The Orphanage is a powerful testimony to the horrors of war in the everyday life of adults and children alike.« Paula Erizanu, Calvert Journal

»Serhiy Zhadan has a wonderful sense of rhythm and musicality in his language … Zhadan is a master of metaphors and he creates very vivid portraits of ordinary people living in a battle zone. In this novel his literary talent shines like painful stars over the urban landscape painted by the silence and noise of the war.« Sofi Oksanen, Literary Hub

»Zhadan places his words – tender, painfully sweet, brash – with a delicate sense for melody and association.« DIE ZEIT

»Zhadan’s powerful language and the pulsing rhythm of his sentences downright whip the reader through the inferno.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»If you want to understand what happened in Eastern Ukraine, you have to read Serhiy Zhadan’s books.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»The Orphanage is a masterpiece [...] It is more than a novel about an almost forgotten European war. It has to do with the universal theme of the person who either loses their home – because they have to or want to – or remains, but can no longer recognise their home as their home.« Literatur Spiegel

»The Orphanage puts on display Serhiy Zhadan’s outstanding capacity for depicting the world of eastern Ukraine with captivating precision and without trivialising or making it banal.« der Freitag

» ... one of the most important and haunting novels to appear this spring.« Sigrid Löffler, RBB Kulturradio

»The force of the language gives way at times to irony or cynicism, which hides resignation. Above all, however, it is the vivid language of an important work that is free from accusations, and rich in a quiet, tremendous sorrow.« Kleine Zeitung

»Though [his] language is at times highly poetic, it is no way stylizes the war. The images Zhadan finds are extremely convincing in their precision.« ORF

»Everywhere people are shooting, at any time a tank can come around the corner, it is unclear just who is friend and who is foe, it is the apocalypse, or as Zhadan himself says numerous times: hell. [He] sketches this world with such an intensity and eye for detail that it becomes clear he does not simply know it from hearsay or the TV.« WDR

»Serhiy Zhadan is not only capable of creating unforgettable images and crazy dialogue: whoever reads his novel will also experience how war smells.« SRF