A bit of a picaresque about a Kharkiv hustler who reluctantly returns to his hometown Luhansk to take over the family gas station after learning his brother has abruptly taken off for Amsterdam. He intends only a temporary stay, but is instead drawn back into the old community of his childhood friends and a kind of ambiguous nostalgia for "Voroshilovgrad" (as it was called by the Soviets), which is as much a character as any of the people. Whether it's fending off threats and extortion from local organized crime, attending a smuggler clan wedding, breaking into an eerily abandoned Pioneer Youth camp, or crashing for the night with nomadic refugees from the east, each of Hermann's various adventures illustrates the life and underground of a kind of liminal city that has thrown off the Soviets yet hasn't quite settled and stabilized into something new.

"Well, take this whole situation with my brother," I said. "It reminds me of German class. It's like I'm being asked to talk about what I see in the pictures, and I really don't like talking about things I know nothing about, Olga. I don't even like the pictures! And I certainly don't like being backed into a corner, and told to play by someone else's rules. Rules only have meaning as long as you're abiding by them. As soon as you start ignoring them, it turns out you don't owe anyone anything, you're not obligated to make up all kinds of silly stories about things you actually know nothing about. Then it turns out you can get by just fine without all those made-up stories, and there aren't any rules - what they're showing you doesn't exist anymore. It's all a sham, they're just trying to use you . . . and it's all perfectly legal, of course. It's like school all over again. The thing is that we all grew up a long time ago but we're still being treated like kids, like unintelligent, deceitful, irrational bastards who need to be coerced and corrected and have the right answers beaten out of them." (Chapter 8)

Unfortunately Luhansk is located in the Donbas region, which has been illegally occupied by Russia since 2014. This book was published four years earlier and in retrospect offers a window into a region whose historic and ongoing oppressor will never let its full potential be realized.

That being said, the portrayal of women here is . . . eesh. Oksana Zabuzhko's very excellent [b:Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex|9274846|Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex|Oksana Zabuzhko|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347239604l/9274846._SY75_.jpg|2652071] is strongly recommended as a follow-up read.