Special: A Ukrainian memoir
We invite you to support both this special book in progress and humanitarian relief in Ukraine by pre-purchasing a copy.
This is a special message about a special project. I am proud to enjoy the extraordinary opportunity to work with Yuliya Shirokova on her memoir of growing up in Ukraine and later in the United States. Although Yuliya has been planning a memoir for years, recent events in her native country were the final catalyst that spurred her to write it now. Her book is as yet untitled. She is working with me to write it during 2022, and Blue Ear Books is planning to publish it in late 2022 or early 2023.
We invite you to support both Yuliya’s book and humanitarian relief in Ukraine by pre-purchasing a copy. On both the Blue Ear Books front page and Yuliya’s author page is a drop-down menu enabling you to pre-purchase her book and add an optional additional sum, to support relief efforts in Ukraine via Yuliya’s friends and family.
Blue Ear Books author Yuliya Shirokova with her uncle, aunt, and sister, all of whom remain in Ukraine, on a family visit from Seattle to Kyiv, January 2022.
Drawing on her own memories and interviews with family members and friends, Yuliya’s book will take us through the turbulent times of the USSR’s perestroika, the breakup of the USSR, Ukraine’s first Independence Day, 9/11, and other events through the eyes of the author as she was growing up and becoming an adult.
Although Yuliya has been in the United States for more than 25 years, she has come to understand the impossibility of escaping the political turbulence she left in the Kyiv of 1996.
You can read more about Yuliya’s book, and a short excerpt, on her author page.
For me, the opportunity to help bring into being, and bring to readers, books of personal experience of history such as Yuliya’s is what Blue Ear Books is all about, and exactly what I want to be doing with my time and talents. My personal hope is that editing and publishing Yuliya’s book will be a way that I can make myself useful in this time of pervasive uncertainty and widespread suffering.
- Ethan Casey, Publisher, Blue Ear Books
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