The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

“Many books at the top of the bestseller list today are not necessarily distinguished by the quality of their language. In Ukraine, however, a book that has been the number-one bestseller since it was published is not only an exception to this rule, but quite the opposite. Oksana Zabuzhko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is so rich and precise in its language, and also so political and demanding, that one cannot help wondering what is different about Ukraine.”

—Kultur Spiegel

“The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is a magnum opus, in which everything that the armory of literature can provide is mobilized against the forces of darkness: strong emotions, the power of pathos, the most compelling images… A novel of power—and a powerful novel.”

—Deutschlandradio

“Pugnacious, feverish, brilliant—with her 759-page novel about the history of Ukraine in the twentieth century, Oksana Zabuzhko has thrown open a window in her homeland. She is already celebrated as a second Dostoyevsky, but above all she has triggered an intense debate about social relationships and their roots in the past that people have yet to come to terms with.”

—Schweizer Radio DRS

“As an attempt at the archeology of memory it sets the world on fire, as a romance novel it is touching, and as a vivisection of social and political injustices in late- and post-communist Ukraine it has a virulence that is difficult to surpass.”

—Ilma Rakusa, NZZ

“Violence and fear lie in the bones of generations of Ukrainians, and what power do the ostracized dead have over the living? Oksana Zabuzhko writes about this heavy subject as lightly and freshly as the main female character talks.”

—WDR

“This book is a spectacular intellectual success. It is driven by the belief that intellectual and political freedom is the only thing worth fighting for, apart from love, of course. Equipped with an almost megalomaniacal imagination and defiant humor, the author invents dreamlike parallel collateral campaigns, illuminates culture, society, and politics in multiple perspectives, and makes ghostly excursions into the past… With The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, Oksana Zabuzhko has written both herself and Ukraine into the scabby heart of Europe.”

—Berliner Zeitung