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Start giftingThe Dreamtime
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Learn moreThis novel offers a unique point of view on the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine 2014, through four intertwining narratives: a guilt-ridden doctor trying to exorcise his demons by exposing himself to war; a young woman tending to her ailing father as the bombs fall around them in Russian-occupied Slovyansk; a mysterious sociopath playing a cat-and-mouse game; and a forensic expert solving a murder case while trying to save her marriage with a discharged soldier. As these threads unfurl, through harrowing scenes of personal and collective trauma, an enigmatic pattern emerges.
Inspired by the Indigenous Australian concept of the "Dreamtime," the plots span in space from Ukraine's war-torn Donbas to southern Europe and southeast Asia, tied together by themes of existential conflict, the blurred line between reality and dreams, and how easily the boundary dissolves between waking life and nightmare.
The novel was published in Kyiv in 2020 as the focal point for a video-art exhibition on the media's role in creating public collective experiences. It was well received by critics and audience and praised for its realism in depicting war, for its creative literary depiction of how dreams reflect the psyche, and for its masterly prose.
Mstyslav Chernov is a Ukrainian war correspondent, filmmaker, photographer, and novelist known for his coverage of the Ukrainian revolution, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Nagorno-Karabakh, and Taliban rule in Afghanistan after U.S. withdrawal, as well as for his art installations and exhibitions. Chernov is an Associated Press (AP) journalist and the president of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers (UAPF). In addition to being nominated for the Livingston Award for his work on the civil unrest in Belarus in 2021 and Rory Peck Award for his coverage of the Battle of Mosul, he has won several prestigious awards, including two Royal Television Society Awards for his coverage of the downing of flight MH17, and the Georgy Gongadze Prize, the Knight International Journalism Award, and the DW Freedom of Speech Award for documenting the siege in Mariupol as one of the few remaining international journalists in that city, as captured in his AP article "20 Days in Mariupol: The Team that Documented the City's Agony," as well as the AP and FRONTLINE documentary special 20 Days in Mariupol. He was named Ukrainian Photographer of the Year in 2013 and 2015. He was born in Eastern Ukraine and is typically based in Germany.