Shortlist, 2022 Witold Pilecki International Book Award

With an Introduction by Timothy Snyder
Polish journalist Pawel Pieniazek was among the first journalists to enter the war-torn region of eastern Ukraine and Greetings from Novorossiya is his vivid firsthand account of the conflict. He was the first reporter to reach the scene when Russian troops in Ukraine accidentally shot down a civilian airliner, killing all 298 people aboard. Unlike Western journalists, his fluency in both Ukrainian and Russian granted him access and the ability to move among all sides in the conflict. With powerful color photos, telling interviews from the local population, and brilliant reportage, Pieniazek’s account documents these dramatic events as they transpired.

This unique firsthand view of history in the making brings to life the tragedy of Ukraine for a Western audience. Historian Timothy Snyder provides wider context in his superb introduction and explores the significance of this ongoing conflict at the border of East and West.

In 2014 Sonya Bilocerkowycz is a tourist at a deadly revolution. At first she is enamored with the Ukrainians’ idealism, which reminds her of her own patriotic family. But when the romantic revolution melts into a war with Russia, she becomes disillusioned, prompting a return home to the US and the diaspora community that raised her. As the daughter of a man who studies Ukrainian dissidents for a living, the granddaughter of war refugees, and the great-granddaughter of a gulag victim, Bilocerkowycz has inherited a legacy of political oppression. But what does it mean when she discovers a missing page from her family’s survival story—one that raises questions about her own guilt?

In these linked essays, Bilocerkowycz invites readers to meet a swirling cast of post-Soviet characters, including a Russian intelligence officer who finds Osama bin Laden a few weeks after 9/11; a Ukrainian poet whose nose gets broken by Russian separatists; and a long-lost relative who drives a bus into the heart of Chernobyl. On Our Way Home from the Revolution muddles our easy distinctions between innocence and culpability, agency and fate.