Lucky Breaks

Mordant, funny, weird and surprising... I really enjoyed these stories, the sharpness and clarity of their observations, their dark humour, and the glimpses they give of an unfamiliar world -- Marcel Theroux * Guardian *
Ukraine's Catch-22... an uncompromising tableau of individuals dislodged by conflict some years before Russia's full-scale invasion... Humour is not a way out for these women, but it does allow the reader a way in... these are stories that stay with you * Telegraph *
A daring, unsettling book about displaced women telling luminous stories to survive the darkness that surrounds them -- Jenny Offill, author of 'Weather'
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 *
Profound narrative absurdities readily evoke the Ukrainian-born Nikolai Gogol's... spellbinding * New York Times *
[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 *
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 *
Women... find themselves constructing surreal narratives in an attempt to capture the strangeness of living a life under bombardment. * Daily Mail *
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 *
In Lucky Breaks, Belorusets is the peerless documentarian of her times, a meticulous stitcher of the incongruities that beset contemporary Ukrainian life * Asymptote *
Timely... moving * Independent *
A tantalisingly oblique collection... as sharp and fragmentary as the shards of lives upended * Irish Times *