Yaroslav Trofimov
Yaroslav Trofimov was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and, after a childhood in Madagascar and adolescence in New York, has worked all over the world for the Wall Street Journal, where he serves as the chief foreign-affairs correspondent. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting in 2022 and in 2023, among many other honours, he is one of the pre-eminent war correspondents of our time and the author of three books of narrative nonfiction. No Country for Love is his first novel.
The abiding lesson of Svetlana Alexievcih’s works is that emotional needs in no way diminish amidst calamity or cataclysm. Even in bare life we see the recognizably human. Similarly, Trofimov depicts the relentless assertion of humanity in the most inhumane of circumstances. No Country for Love follows one young woman, Debora Rosenbaum, from her arrival in promise-filled Kharkiv, Ukraine, through Holodomor, only to be wedged into a corner by the jackboots of Naziism and Stalinism. Her resilience and hope in 1930s Soviet Ukraine holds obvious parallels for modern readers, but it’s a virtue of this novel that the reader can drop the historical analogies and immerse in each moment.