Ivan Ivak is a Ukrainian writer with a dark past, who knows too much about the oppression and cruelty of the Soviet era. His last wish is to repent-for he also knows that his repentance is necessary if his children are to have a future.
Eugenia Kononenko was born in Kyiv in 1959 and graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Kyiv State University and in French philology from the Kyiv Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages. A fiction writer, poet, essayist, and the author of children's books, she is also a literary translstor-her translations include Annie Ernaux's A Woman's Story-and she works at the Ukrainian Centre for Cultural Studies.
