Seventeen-year-old Debora Rosenbaum, ambitious and in love with literature, arrives in the capital of the new Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Kharkiv. The stale and forbidding ways of the past are out; 1930 is a new dawn, the Soviet era, where skyscrapers go up overnight. Debora finds work and meets a dashing young officer named Samuel who is training to become a fighter pilot. But Debora’s prospects and Ukraine’s soon dim. State-induced famine rolls through the depleted countryside, and any deviation from Moscow ideology is punished by disappearance. When Samuel is sentenced to ten years’ hard labour, Debora is left on her own with a baby. As advancing Nazi armies move through Ukraine, its yellow fields of wheat run red with blood. Forced to renounce the man she loves, her identity and even her name, Debora also learns to endure, manipulate and resist.
