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Seventeen-year-old Debora Rosenbaum, ambitious and in love with literature, arrives in the capital of the new Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Kharkiv, to make her own fate as a modern woman. 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. They fall in love, and begin to become part of Ukraine’s new cultural elite. But Debora’s prospects – and Ukraine’s – soon dim. Famine rolls through the over-harvested countryside, and any deviation from Moscow-dictated ideology is punished by disappearance: without warning, Samuel is sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. Debora is on her own with a baby. And this is only the beginning.