Warm Arctic Nights — Yuriy Tarnawsky

By turns reminiscent of Zweig's The World of Yesterday and Kosinsky's The Painted Bird, Yuriy Tarnawsky's Warm Arctic Nights is a swift and deeply engrossing fictive memoir of an idyllic childhood whose martial and masculine tenets presage an onslaught of inhumanity and fear. Steeped in subtle irony and the surreal, it is also a sui generis act of remembrance, memorial, and love. -- Michael Mejia, author of TOKYO and Forgetfulness