In Lucky Breaks, we encounter anonymous women from the margins of Ukrainian society, their lives upended by the ongoing conflict with Russia. A woman, bewildered by her broken umbrella, tries to abandon it like a sick relative; a beautiful florist suddenly disappears, her shop converted into a warehouse for propaganda; hiding out from the shelling, neighbours read horoscopes in the local paper that tell them when it's safe to go outside.
In stories of linguistic verve and dark, absurdist wit, Yevgenia Belorusets writes of how trauma seeps into the mundane, telling surreal, unsettling tales of survival in a shattered country.
Review
A daring, unsettling book about displaced women telling luminous stories to survive the darkness that surrounds them -- Jenny Offill, author of 'Weather'
[Lucky Breaks] is a book in Russian about the war in Ukraine that does not describe combat operations and that forbears to generalize in any way... The tender and terrible stories of Yevgenia Belorusets, where bogeyman tales of childhood dress in the language of Jean Genet, and the documentary dilates into the epic, become the history we all have in common - Maria Stepanova, author of 'In Memory of Memory'
This collection of immediate and eccentric stories... presents a series of sideline encounters with Ukrainian women whose lives have been caught up, often imperceptibly, in the Donbas conflict... Lucky Breaks asks essential questions about the ethical implications of blurring the boundary between fiction and reality - Financial Times
Through Belorusets's lens, small actions and encounters take on the qualities of myth... The effect is rather as if Isaac Babel and the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich had offspring -- Claire Messud - Harper's
Beguiling... haunting, lyrical - Economist
Belorusets, a documentary photographer and activist, captures the extraordinary lives of ordinary Ukrainian women in her arresting fiction debut... powerful - Publishers Weekly
Belorusets is interested in the histories of the defeated, of the unseen and unheard, and above all in the experiences of eastern Ukrainian women in wartime... excruciatingly topical - The Baffler
In Yevgenia Belorusets's collection of short stories, Lucky Breaks, the machine-gun is fired and the mortar explodes, but offstage. Her stories are about anonymous women who trace new existences or disappear in the fog and ruins of the frozen conflict - TLS
Belorusets... excels at building stories that serve as striking snapshots of lives... this singular collection brings Ukraine, "the land of residual phenomena," entirely to life. Striking and original. - Kirkus Reviews
In Belorusets' prose - which braids together the real with the phantasmagorical - we find inflections of a common humanity in the smallest of details - The Calvert Journal
About the Author
Yevgenia Belorusets is a Ukrainian writer, journalist, artist and photographer who lives between Kyiv and Berlin. Her photographic work calls attention to the more vulnerable sections of Ukrainian society - queer families, out-of-work coal miners, the Roma people living in the war zone in the East - and was shown in the Ukrainian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. She was awarded the 2020 HKW International Literature Award in Germany for Lucky Breaks, her first work of fiction.
EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY is a professor, poet and translator. He is the author of The Feeling Sonnets and The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and the translator of Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, also available from Pushkin Press.
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