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Themes of fear, desire, and national camaraderie flow through Ukrainian author and philosopher Zabuzhko’s (The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, 2012, etc.) eight fiery tales.

Zabuzhko has been recognized internationally for her irreverent voice, and, even within the first few pages of this collection, one can see why. Zabuzhko does not mince words. She takes up space—drawing a sentence out to half a page and a paragraph out to three—and allows her mostly female protagonists to do the same. They follow their tangents, express judgments, and indulge in fantasies. In “Girls,” for example, a woman named Darka reflects on her days as a schoolgirl and her first sexual relationship, with her classmate Effie: “Now, from the vantage point of this dull bare plateau that is called experience, Darka could consider something else: namely that Effie with her innate vulnerability, her innate fragility—she was like a package, its contents cushioned in layers of paper, stamped Fragile on all sides in runny ink and sent on its way, yet without an address—this perfidious, secret, gracious, spoiled, truly vicious and irresistibly seductive inward aflame Effie-Fawn, simply had to find, at an early age, her own way of protecting herself.” On the one hand, this style, overfilled with em dashes and run-on sentences, can come at the price of worldbuilding; without much variety in sentence structure, settling in to each story and adjusting to its pace often feels difficult. On the other hand, if the reader puts in the work, this same whirlwind style produces female characters with fascinating internal lives and emotional crescendos that land. Zabuzhko’s characters struggle with domestic issues like navigating sibling rivalry or accepting a child’s sudden need for independence, each problem made thornier by the omnipresence of gender expectations, the terror of the KGB, or the passion of the Orange Revolution. The final story, “No Entry to the Performance Hall After the Third Bell,” offers a particularly intimate look at the way not only a current war, but the history of war, affects personal relationships. How does a mother protect her daughter from pain and trauma? Which secrets must she hold close and which, in her silence, drive a wedge between her and her daughter?

Evocative stories about the way national issues impact even the most personal aspects of life.