Seventeen-year-old Deborah Rosenbaum, ambitious and in love with literature, arrives in the capital of the new Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Kharkiv, 1930, to make her own fate as a modern woman. The stale and forbidding ways of the past are out; it''s a new dawn, the Soviet era, where skyscrapers go up overnight. Deborah finds work and meets a dashing young officer named Samuel who is training to become a fighter pilot. They fall in love, and she becomes pregnant.
But Deborah''s prospects - and Ukraine''s - soon dim. Famine plagues the over-harvested countryside, and any deviation from Moscow-dictated ideology is punished by disappearance: without warning, Samuel is sentenced to ten years'' hard labour. Deborah is on her own with a baby. And this is only the beginning.
Germany and Russia mobilize, and Ukraine becomes the no-man''s-land during World War II, where its yellow fields of wheat run red with blood. Caught in the middle, like her country, Deborah mus
