2023 Read Widely: Russia & Eastern Europe

"In 1986, renowned nuclear scientist Anna Berkov is sleeping in her bed in the Soviet Union when Chernobyl's reactor melts down. At that exact moment she tears through time-her first jump-and it's an accident. When she opens her eyes, she's landed in 1992 only to discover Molly, her estranged daughter, shot in the chest. Molly, with her dying breath, begs Anna to go back in time and stop the disaster, to save Molly's daughter Raisa, and put their...

"It's been twelve years since inseparable childhood friends Lejla and Sara have spoken, but an unexpected phone call from Lejla thrusts Sara back in a world of memories, language and relationships she's tried hard to forget."

"Based on a true story, this is a powerful novel about a Jewish family who were victims of Nazi genocide in Latvia, one of the Baltic states. It is based on the little known, horrific Rumbula Massacre when 30,000 Jews were slaughtered in two days in 1941. In 1941, Miriam, the matriarch of the family, is the sole survivor of this horrendous massacre. She has had to make a 'Sophie's Choice' - and abandon her children to the care of a Gentile friend...

"Dick Canidy and the agents of the OSS scour war torn Poland looking for a rocket scientist who holds the secrets to the Nazis most dangerous weapon in this new entry in W.E.B. Griffin's New York Times bestselling Men at War series"-- April 1940. By terms of the Soviet Nazi Nonaggression pact, the two dictatorships divided the helpless nation of Poland. Now, the Russians are rounding up enemies of the state in their occupation zone, but one essential...

"Elektra is a spellbinding reimagining of the story of one of Greek mythology's most infamous heroines, from Jennifer Saint, the author of the beloved international bestseller, Ariadne. Three women, tangled in an ancient curse. When Clytemnestra marries Agamemnon, she ignores the insidious whispers about his family line, the House of Atreus. But when, on the eve of the Trojan War, Agamemnon betrays Clytemnestra in the most unimaginable way, she must...

Hailed for her "fearless indictment of the most powerful man in Russia" (The Wall Street Journal), award-winning journalist Masha Gessen is unparalleled in her understanding of the events and forces that have wracked her native country in recent times. In The Future Is History, she follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren...

"This rollicking book has it all: sex, lies, and scenery. Grant Ginder weaves a wonderful, engrossing multi-generational family story, with the Greek isles as a backdrop so beautiful that the reader will want to dive in."--Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of The Vacationers and Modern Lovers. An irresistible, deftly observed novel about family, regret, and vacation by the author of The People We Hate at the Wedding. The Wright family...

"In late March 1944, as Stalin's forces push into Ukraine, young Emil and Adeline Martel must make a terrible decision: Do they wait for the Soviet bear's intrusion and risk being sent to Siberia? Or do they reluctantly follow the wolves-murderous Nazi officers who have pledged to protect “pure-blood” Germans? The Martels are one of many families of German heritage whose ancestors have farmed in Ukraine for more than a century. But after already...

"As their communities were being destroyed, groups of Jewish women and teenage girls across Poland began transforming Jewish youth groups into resistance factions. These "ghetto girls" helped build systems of underground bunkers, paid off the Gestapo, and bombed German train lines. At the center of the book is eighteen-year-old Renia Kukielka, who traveled across her war-torn country as a weapons smuggler and messenger. Other women who joined the...

This is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world. Handpicked by the "family" surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin seemed like a perfect choice for the oligarchy to shape according to its own designs. Suddenly...