La meva Ucraïna

In 2014, Vika returns to her native Ukraine to investigate a family mystery: how her great-great-uncle Nikodim died in the 1930s and why his story remains taboo nearly a century later. Although unraveling old unknowns is always complicated, she had not foreseen that her strongest resistance would be found in her grandmother Valentina, who forbids her from stirring up her past. It is not for nothing that Ukraine is a "land of blood", like its neighbors Poland, Belarus, Russia and the Baltic countries. In the Poltava region, where the family lived, the KGB is long gone, but its former headquarters still terrifies the locals. As the country plunges into a new conflict with Russia following the annexation of Crimea, the reader accompanies Vika into the feared secret police archives of the former USSR in search of the truth about the country's past and about Nikodim, including risk of a direct confrontation with his family. Between the memoir and the detective novel, this work combines its enormous emotional charge with a lucid analysis of the story. As Victoria Belim finished this novel about a Ukraine trying to make peace with her past and flourish, her homeland was once again facing the pain of another cruel war.