It took me a couple chapters to feel like I found my footing in the story. That plus the Kyiv setting and rarely explored place/time in history made this book too good to pass up. Stories with alternating timelines are hit or miss for me, but Katherine Marsh is an author whose books have been on my To Be Read list for a long time. Set in alternating timelines that connect the present-day to the 1930s and the US to the USSR, Katherine Marsh’s latest novel sheds fresh light on the Holodomor – the horrific famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, and which the Soviet government covered up for decades.Īn incredibly timely, page-turning story of family, survival, and sacrifice, inspired by Marsh’s own family history, The Lost Year is perfect for fans of Ruta Sepetys’ Between Shades of Gray and Alan Gratz’s Refugee.

His journalist dad is stuck overseas indefinitely, and his mom has moved in his one-hundred-year-old great-grandmother to ride out the pandemic, adding to his stress and isolation.īut when Matthew finds a tattered black-and-white photo in his great-grandmother’s belongings, he discovers a clue to a hidden chapter of her past, one that will lead to a life-shattering family secret. Published JanuAmazon | Bookshop | Goodreads About The Lost Yearįrom the author of Nowhere Boy – called “a resistance novel for our times” by The New York Times – comes a brilliant middle-grade survival story that traces a harrowing family secret back to the Holodomor, a terrible famine that devastated Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s. The Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukranian Famine

The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh