"Ukrainian Portraits: Diaries from the Border"
Published September 01, 2023, Guernica Editions
At the end of March of 2022, I travelled to the Ukrainian-Polish border to volunteer at a refugee evacuation centre. Much as I tried to prepare myself psychologically, what I encountered face-to-face didn't fit any of my expectations: I saw a disaster on a massive scale. I went to volunteer as someone who speaks Russian, Ukrainian and other languages; someone who had been a refugee herself. I soon realized that what the Ukrainian refugees needed most (apart from practical advice) was to talk about their experiences. They needed to be heard.
In Bookstores and Online
"Expulsion & Other Stories"
Guernica Editions
A solitary figure crossing the courtyard at night inching towards a manhole… this is how Moscow looked like in the 50s of the past century. I thought this photograph to be appropriate for the cover of my new collection of short stories, quite a few of which are “inhabited” by protagonists born around that time, with a long shadow of Stalin still hovering over their lives.
When I began writing this book the grey monolith of the Soviet civilization, with its language, its signs and symbols seemed to be gone forever: the hammer and sickle eagerly replaced by a two-headed eagle; streets and cities jumping back to their original, pre-revolutionary names. When I finished the book, the history went in reverse, with the KGB operative firmly leading the country to a new abyss. What is it in human psyche that makes such disastrous detours possible? Looking for an answer I wanted to examine the lives of people who were neither heroes nor villains. Among them I found cads and cowards, bureaucrats and secret sadists against whose grim moral backgrounds the small acts of kindness and grace and mercy shine with a brighter, more treasured light.
For the sake of this light I wrote my stories.
Guernica Editions
260 pages
ISBN 9781550719451
In bookstores and Online
"Lucia's Eyes and Other Stories"
Guernica Editions
The resistance of the human spirit in face of time, disloyalty, and oblivion is the theme of Marina Sonkina’s new collection of short stories. Her seemingly naïve and helpless protagonists inhabit disparate social stations, geographical locales and cultures. But in their struggles for survival, they discover the redeeming and dangerous power of unconditional love – the only weapon available to them. Strange and incomprehensible to everyone, love makes its sudden appearance to an eight-year-old hunchbacked boy in the title story of Lucia’s Eyes. As he brings the gifts of his artistic imagination to Lucia, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, the bleak and cruel reality of Stalin’s Russia dissolves into magic … In “Carmelita” an aging man from Winnipeg, vacationing in Mexico, falls in love with a young Mexican painter. In “Christmas Tango” a jobless drifter in snowy Montreal discovers tango, inadvertently transforming his own life and the lives of those who come in contact with him. In “Angels Ascending and Descending” a young girl is initiated into the mysterious symbolism of Russian Orthodox church architecture by a priestly man who hardly lives up to the spiritual heights he preaches. Full of unexpected turns and twists, sadness, joy and humour, these stories reflect life, itself always a surprise, and always a miracle.
In bookstores and Online
Rapture and other stories
To be published in December 2023 by MW Books
These are profoundly moving tales of love, longing and redemption told by people of all walks of life: a Chilean expat returning to Chili after twenty five years of absence, only to confront the secret he hoped would be forgotten; a widower who finds new meaning of life in conversations with a five year-old; a US Vietnam dodger looking for eternal life in the myths of First Nations; a writer whose art triumphs over the pains of unrequited love.
"Larissa"
A Novel
To be published in 2024 by Guernica Editions
Both lighthearted and tragic, this tale of suffering and love takes us to Ukraine, central Russia, Siberia above the Arctic Circle, Montenegro and Canada. The “silent generations” of the Soviet history speak through the voice of a woman who is trying to come to terms with the dramatic past of her two countries - Russia and Ukraine - as well as her own family history.
Copyright © 2023 Marina Sonkina. All rights reserved.