Behind Your Back
Will be published approx. on 17. November 2026
Book
Hardback
300 pages
978-0-674-30769-8 (ISBN)
Description
Mixing wry humor and riveting emotional depth, Behind Your Back paints a portrait of womanhood in war-torn Ukraine. The novel recounts the intimate journey of a heroine trying to reconcile freedom and societal expectations.
In 2015, Marta finds herself confused and upset when her boyfriend Max is drafted to serve in the Ukrainian Army. She has a successful career in Lviv's booming IT industry, and she and Max live a comfortable life distant from politics and war-until Max's conscription.
With Max hundreds of miles away, undergoing what seems like endless preliminary training, Marta tries hard to fit the model of a war hero's girlfriend and to embrace the new patriotism that has become the norm in Ukraine. She volunteers for the Army, meeting other women whose partners are away fighting. Yet she resists social pressures and her resentment towards Max builds. Faced with impossible choices, Marta reaches a breaking point, and it sets off a series of events that force her to take a sober look at what it means to strive for freedom and happiness under conditions of war.
In 2015, Marta finds herself confused and upset when her boyfriend Max is drafted to serve in the Ukrainian Army. She has a successful career in Lviv's booming IT industry, and she and Max live a comfortable life distant from politics and war-until Max's conscription.
With Max hundreds of miles away, undergoing what seems like endless preliminary training, Marta tries hard to fit the model of a war hero's girlfriend and to embrace the new patriotism that has become the norm in Ukraine. She volunteers for the Army, meeting other women whose partners are away fighting. Yet she resists social pressures and her resentment towards Max builds. Faced with impossible choices, Marta reaches a breaking point, and it sets off a series of events that force her to take a sober look at what it means to strive for freedom and happiness under conditions of war.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge, Mass
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 203 mm
Width: 127 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-674-30769-8 (9780674307698)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Haska (Halyna) Shyyan is a bookshop owner, writer, poet, and translator. Her novel Behind Your Back was the first Ukrainian novel to receive the European Union Prize for Literature in 2019 and also won multiple Ukrainian literary prizes. Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler is a poet and translator whose work includes co-translations of Serhiy Zhadan's novels Voroshilovgrad and The Orphanage.