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A
fusion of documentary and psychological thriller inspired by true events conceived and written over an eight-year period. Drawing on the Indigenous Australian concept of dreamtime, the novel explores a society's collective experience of war and conflict and is based on real events that the author, a war correspondent and photojournalist, witnessed during the war in eastern Ukraine and the migration crises in southern Europe over recent years.
List of contents
First Wall
Second Wall
Third Wall
About the author
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" (March 22, 2022, AP) 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.
Summary
A Kirkus Best Indie Book of the Year & a Library Journal Best World Literature read, from Pulitzer Prize-winning AP Journalist and Director/Producer/Writer of 20 Days in Mariupol, Winner of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival's Audience Award in World Cinema Documentary
“[A] book for our times—vivid enough to grab us and not let go.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A powerful psychological thriller about borderline situations in life, hopes and dreams. Written against the backdrop of the war, before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the story acquires an additional passionate and humanistic significance." — Andrey Kurkov, author of Grey Bees
“[T]his timely novel from a Ukrainian author excels at examining the connection between reality and dreams and exploring the effects of war on the human psyche.” — Library Journal
The Dreamtime is a fusion of documentary and military fiction inspired by the author’s experience as an award-winning war correspondent that offers a unique and gritty point of view on the horrors of war through four intertwining narratives. Parallel storylines from 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 bring a raw intensity and a deeply personal connection to the effects of war. As the threads of their stories unfurl, through harrowing scenes of personal and collective trauma, an enigmatic pattern emerges.
Shifting from Ukraine's war-torn Donbas to southern Europe and southeast Asia, The Dreamtime ties together themes of existential conflict, the blurred line between reality and dreams, and how easily the boundary dissolves between waking life and nightmare. Originally published in Kyiv in 2020, The Dreamtime has been well received by critics around the world and praised for its realism in depicting war, for its creative literary depiction of how dreams reflect the psyche, and for its masterly prose.
