Estación Ucrania

The Russian invasion of the Ukraine generated an urgent flood of editorial novelties. This book does not belong in that category. It is not a report on the war, it is not an accelerated editorial assignment. Its author, Borja Lasheras, began writing it in 2016, after several years traveling around the country. Today it can be read as a portrait of the country that was before February 24, 2022, the germ of the country that could be in the future: the one that emerged after the Maidan revolution and that, despite the war in Donbas, the crisis economy and endemic corruption, he dreamed of a more "normal" future. Through its pages appear activists, politicians, filmmakers, musicians and novelists who recount their aspirations, fears and frustrations. They are the visible faces of a generation whose enthusiasm always carries the threat of disappointment. Its reverse is the drunken elderly, the nostalgic for the Soviet era, the survivors of a border region hit by all the geopolitical earthquakes of the last century and a half. Between melancholy and wonder, Estación Ukraine has the best qualities of the best travel literature and political essays.