2025 is going to be a big year for books written by immigrant authors hailing from the Soviet Union who now call North America home. Since 2021, I’ve kept a running list of books coming out from our community as a way to keep tabs and, frankly, because no one else was doing it. Last year, when my own debut novel came out, there were only 7 books out from our community, a couple of them paperback editions of 2023 novels. This year, however, we have twelve new titles, plus three books–including my own–being released in paperback. A recent record! I imagine the war in Ukraine might have had something to do with this increased output as several of the authors below engage with the war and the resulting refugee crisis. As the war drags on and the public’s attention on it wanes, this feels like an especially critical time for our voices to be heard. This is why I’m glad to see that our books are finding publishers and readers, and I hope that the incredible variety of books on this list is encouraging to other writers in our community. From poetry to dystopian novels to short story collections, nonfiction, and a cookbook memoir, check out the list of FSU books and please support these authors by pre-ordering.
This list is arranged by date of publication.
SIMON SHUSTER
THE SHOWMAN paperback | HarperCollins | January 2025
This instant New York Times bestseller chronicling President Zelensky’s first year of navigating Russia’s full-scale invasion has been a defining work on the war in Ukraine. Shuster, a journalist with Time, got unprecedented access to Ukraine’s president and his staff and wove a narrative that goes beyond war coverage to paint a portrait of a showman who found himself at the helm of a disaster. I got to review it for KQED.
YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
NO COUNTRY FOR LOVE | Abacus | February 11, 2025
NPR said “No Country for Love is Doctor Zhivago meets Stalingrad—a mix of romantic historical fiction and gritty, reportage-like storytelling.” It’s a story of Debora, a Jewish woman with big dreams in Soviet Ukraine of the 1930s, who carves out a life for herself and makes hard choices as her country heaves under Stalinism. Born in Kyiv, Trofimov is the chief foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. This is his first work of fiction and is based on the real story of his grandmother.
JULIA ALEKSEYEVA
ANTIFASCISM AND THE AVANT-GARDE | University of California Press | February 2025
Inspired in part by the radical art of the Soviet 1920s, leftist filmmakers in countries including France and Japan revolutionized the art of documentary, daring to make film a powerful weapon in the fight against fascism. Antifascism and the Avant-Garde provides a transnational ecology of antifascist art that resonates profoundly with our current age.
JULIA KOLCHINSKY
PARALLAX | University of Arkansas Press | March 2025
Julia Kolchinsky’s Parallax offers a lyrical narrative of parenting a neurodiverse child under the shadow of the ongoing war in Ukraine, where the poet was born. Ilya Kaminsky said “In the end, this is most of all a book about being a mother, which is to say, it’s about the universe.” I can’t think of higher praise.
LUISA MURADYAN
I MAKE JOKES WHEN I’M DEVASTATED | SMU Project Poëtica/Bridwell Press | March 2025
Luisa Muradyan’s I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated evokes love, grief, hope, and longing across generations, continents, and the devastation in Ukraine. Midwest grocery stores, Tony Soprano, murderous internet moms, Soviet scientists, and the Cheesecake Factory populate these poems, as Muradyan brilliantly uses humor to contend with what it means to mother one’s children in the midst of immense loss. This cover is my favorite one on this list.
INNA KRASNOPER
DIS TANZ | Veliz | March 2025
March must be a poetry month because we also have Inna Krasnoper’s debut English-language poetry collection, described by her publisher Veliz as “an unfolding space of movement and transition, tracing questions of identity, language, and belonging […] dis tanz is a book that problematizes the gaps between languages, but also looks for points of contact, and the means for becoming proximate.”
BORIS FISHMAN
THE UNWANTED | HarperCollins | March 25, 2025
I’m excited to see Boris Fishman returning to fiction with The Unwanted, a fierce and staggering new page-turner full of cruelty, tenderness, and heroism, about a young girl and her parents fleeing an unnamed civil war and the brutal dictatorship that has targeted their family. Publishers Weekly gave it a star and said, “Fans of dystopian classics like 1984 will find much to savor in Fishman’s spellbinding tale.” As 2025 is lining up to be “the year of the dystopian novel,” I think Fishman’s take on a human tragedy will stand out from the sea of novels about tech.
KATYA APEKINA
MOTHER DOLL paperback | Overlook Press | March 2025
Katya Apekina’s second novel “is not only a harrowing examination of generational trauma, but a damn funny one,” according to Vogue. Zhenia, adrift in Los Angeles and pregnant with a baby her husband doesn’t want, connects with the very opinionated and often hilarious ghost of her great-grandmother Irina who tells her the story of the Russian Revolution to which she had a front-row seat. You can check out my interview with Katya in LA Review of Books.
JULIE MASIS
HOW MY GRANDFATHER STOLE A SHOE (cover forthcoming) | Academic Studies Press | April 2025
Journalist Julie Masis captures the little known story of 10,000 Moldovan Jews imprisoned in the Romanian-occupied part of Ukraine through the memories of her grandfather Shlomo Masis, a survivor who lived to the remarkable age of 102. His recollections reveal stories of resilience, including how some Ukrainians aided the Jews in the ghetto. Masis also delves into a family legend about a German medic who reportedly fell in love with her Jewish grandmother, shedding light on both the horrors and the unexpected human connections that defined WWII.
OLGA STEIN
LOVE SONGS: PRAYERS TO GODS, NOT MEN (cover forthcoming) | AOS Publishing | April
The poems in Love Songs: Prayers to Gods, Not Men, examine love from a variety of artistic, intellectual, and cultural vantage points, and from the high and low of art. This collection interpolates women’s voices as a way of challenging standard authority/ies on the subject. Many of the poems wrestle with love and sexuality. Ultimately, the collection functions as intertextual and meta-poetic commentary on the writing of poetry (as well as its reception), and Stein’s own efforts to express herself through this art form.
ALINA ADAMS
GO ON PRETENDING | History Through Fiction | May 1, 2025
Three generations of women battle against the tides of history, from segregated 1950s America to the fall of the USSR and the rise of revolutionary Rojava. New York Times bestselling author Alina Adams brings her unique perspective as a Soviet immigrant to the U.S. who mastered English through soap operas to this multilayered tale. Alina Adams’ last novel, My Mother’s Secret, about the Jewish Autonomous Region, also came out with History Through Fiction.
MARIA REVA
ENDLING | Penguin Random House | June 3, 2025
In the absurdist literary tradition of George Saunders and Percival Everett comes a brilliant debut novel about a biologist in Ukraine battling to save the country’s snail species from the brink of extinction. If Reva’s much-anticipated novel is anything like her hilarious story collection Good Citizens Need Not Fear about a crumbling Soviet apartment building, this is going to be a real gem!
GARY SHTEYNGART
VERA, OR FAITH | Penguin Random House | July 8, 2025
A poignant, sharp-eyed, and bitterly funny tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country rapidly coming apart, told through the eyes of their wondrous ten-year-old daughter Vera. According to LitHub, “Shteyngart’s new novel is the story of a very volatile family in a very volatile America, filtered through the eyes of a child, who just wanted to be loved (the most Shteyngartian of motivations, and the most human).”
MIKHAIL IOSSEL
SENTENCE | Linda Leith Publishing | August 2025
Sentence is a remarkable juggling act between genres and countries, memory and imagination, past and present—a celebration of linguistic freedom and virtuosity. I heard Mikhail describe it as a “difficult” book, but I’d wager a bet that Sentence is going to be a damn beautiful one. Mikhail Iossel teaches at Concordia University and is the founder of Summer Literary Seminars.
POLINA CHESNAKOVA
CHESNOK: COOKING FROM MY CORNER OF THE SOVIET DIASPORA (cover forthcoming) | Hardie Grant | September 2025
With this cookbook and memoir, Chesnakova has created a scrumptious journey through time and space, giving a new life to recipes familiar to those of us who grew up in Soviet kitchens. I was lucky enough to see the manuscript and it immediately sent me off to an Eastern European grocery store. If you don’t follow Polina Chesnakova on the web, you’re missing out.
KRISTINA TEN
TELL ME YOURS, I’LL TELL YOU MINE (cover forthcoming) | Stillhouse Press | October 2025
Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is a fantastical, genre-crossing collection exploring the darker side of games and childlore in which immigrants, women, and queer people confront the horrors of living in a society hell-bent on controlling every aspect of their identities—in one story, the diabolical presence in the depths of a language-learning CD-ROM; in another, a declining empire’s sinister matchmaking system—in the vein of Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and Kim Fu.
SASHA VASILYUK
YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY paperback | Bloomsbury | Fall 2025
My own debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory, will be out in paperback in the fall with a fresh new wintery cover, inspired by the French edition. This is a historical novel based on real events about the price of secrecy, the weight of lies, and one man’s drive to protect his family from his past. It received many nice reviews, though my favorite is probably this one, from Masters Review, that said “The moral weight of choices being lived through… elevates Vasilyuk’s novel above its peers, giving the debut historical depth and poignancy that touch the core of the human condition.”
Punctured Lines 
Such a tempting list. All different publishers? I
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Thank you for reading. A couple are from the same publisher, but yes, many different ones.
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