Forgottenness by Tanja Maljartschuk

Winner of BBC Ukrainian Book of the Year Award (2016)

Winner of Usedom Literature Prize (2022)

“I didn't want this beguiling and immersive novel to end. It's that unusual creation, an intimate epic, and its characters continue to flood my thoughts. The translation does justice to the author's virtuoso performance.” - Martina Devlin

Two tales intertwined in a profound double portrait, Forgottenness painstakingly traces parallels between the historical and the contemporary, the collective and the individual, between the stories of two people born on the same day, a century apart.

The narrator, a writer grappling with her growing anxiety and obsessive thoughts, becomes fixated on Viacheslav Lypynskyi (1882–1931), a once-significant figure in the struggle for Ukrainian independence who has since fallen into oblivion, into the gaping mouth of Time.

As she plunges into her nation’s history to come to terms with her own, we slowly uncover the complex relationship between time, memory and identity to confront the question – what does it mean to remember?

Translated by Zenia Tompkins.

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