A Foreign Affair and Other Stories

Four stories begin with ordinary desires—love, adventure, belonging, freedom—and take their characters considerably farther than they expected.

In A Foreign Affair, a wealthy American arrives in Kyiv looking for romance and discovers that attention can have a price.

In Love Notes From Tokyo, a Ukrainian woman and an Englishman living in Japan conduct an eleven-week courtship entirely by email, falling in love with each other’s words before discovering what words cannot settle.

In Gonta, two Kyiv shipwrights cross Siberia and the Pacific world in search of the yacht they built with their own hands and never stopped thinking of as theirs.

And in Maidan Revolution, fiction based on real events is combined with photographs taken during Ukraine’s 2013–2014 uprising, as private frustration becomes part of a national revolt.

The settings change from Kyiv to Tokyo, Australia, and the barricades of Maidan. The common thread is less geographical than human: people convince themselves they understand what is happening, and reality eventually corrects them.

A Foreign Affair and Other Stories brings together romance, black comedy, true-life adventure, political upheaval, and documentary photography in one illustrated collection.