Daughter by Tamara Duda

Daughter by Tamara Duda must be one of the most difficult, thus more important books to read. It is a novel on the russo-Ukrainian war. It was first published in 2019, a novel based on real events, on stories from real people. The author, Tamara, started volunteering for the army when the russians attacked in 2014. This is her story, modified, but rooted in reality and personal experiences. After the full-scale invasion started there was a push to translate the book in English and publish it.
This was a book recommended to me by someone who is not Ukrainian but who cares a lot about Ukraine. I’m glad I was told about this book as I didn’t know about it otherwise. It is a good read, a must read.

This is a story about Donbas, about people who were realising what is happening, others who lived in the past, and others who were not interested in “politics”. I recognised some of the things the russians did. It was similar to the stories I’ve read and heard from the full-scale invasion. The book is not so much about that, but about everyday life, how people cooked, interacted, found food, found supplies, had to navigate their place among others who felt differently, had to deal with death, helping people and animals.
She is not whitewashing the situation in Donbas. Instead the story offers balance and nuances. It is so well written.

I will share a few quotes:

The haste with which supermarket chains rushed to replace Ukrainian goods with Russian ones just looked like a clumsy attempt at washing the blood away from a crime scene. They must really fear Ukraine, then, if they are ready to wage a war against Ukrainian soured cream… [this is what also happens in the temporarily occupied territories today]

We were reading the ads under the ‘broshenki’ section on a Donetsk online forum. A broshenka, from the Russian word ‘brosat’’, ‘to throw away’, or ‘broshennyi’, ‘abandoned’, was a flat which belonged to refugees or to people from Donetsk who, most likely, would never return home. Recently, there had been a boom in carpets, appliances, and furniture at our online second hand sites: they all went for a song, being sold at half or a third of their actual value. Everything was paid for in roubles, for ‘pick-up only’. [this is also happening today]

Have you ever seen a house that has been abandoned without notice? The houseplants are the first to die.

I highly recommend this book. It’s not easy to read about the horrifying stories, but for us these are just stories. The least we can do is to read them.

Daughter by Tamara Duda

Details about the picture: –
My rating: 5/5 Stars
Would I recommend it: YES!
Published by: Mosaic Press
Year it was published: 2022 [first edition, in Ukrainian, was published in 2019]
Format: ebook
Genre(s): Contemporary fiction – based on real events
Pages: 354

About the author: Tamara Anatoliyivna Duda was born on 5 January 1976. She is known in Ukraine by the pseudonym Tamara Horikha Zernya. She is a Ukrainian writer and translator. Having first become known for her Facebook page documenting her time as a volunteer in the Donbas during the early stages of the russo-Ukrainian War, Duda has since gone on to become a novelist, with her debut novel Daughter winning the 2022 Shevchenko National Prize for Literature and was named the Book of the Year by BBC News Ukrainian.
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