The Rooster House: A Ukrainian Family Memoir (Dilly's Story) [hardcover] Belim,

Virago Press Ltd

A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK\n\n'Wild Swans for Ukraine ... rich and magnificent' Bookseller\n\n'A paean to hope and home. I loved it and it will haunt me'\nHELEN MACDONALD\n\n'Marvellously vivid and often heartbreaking... I read it in a single enthralled sitting'\nMIRANDA SEYMOUR\n\n'An instant classic: an essential book in these darkening times'\nSOPHY ROBERTS\n\n'Compelling, beautifully written... an insight into the complexity of Ukraine's history'\nMERIEL SCHINDLER\n\nIn the Ukrainian city of Poltava stands a building known as the Rooster House, an elegant mansion with two voluptuous red roosters flanking the door. It doesn't look horrifying. And yet, when Victoria was a girl growing up in the 1980s, her great-grandmother would take pains to avoid walking past it.\n\nIn 2014, while the Russian state was annexing Crimea, Victoria visited her grandmother in Bereh, the hamlet near Poltava that was a haven in her childhood. Just before the trip she came across her great-grandfather's .