The Rooster House

They say the Rooster House is the tallest building in Ukraine: even from its basement, you can see all the way to Siberia. Decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the cries of tortured prisoners had long faded, little Victoria watched her great-grandmother take the longest route around the city to avoid walking past its gates, with the giant red sirens - called roosters in Ukrainian - atop its walls. As an adult, Victoria visited her grandmother in 2014, and while the Russian state annexed Crimea, she came across her great-grandfather"'s diary, one page scored deep with the single line: "'Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine."' She had never heard of this uncle and no one - especially her grandmother - could bear to tell her about him. It took years of searching Ukraine"'s post-Soviet bureaucracy, travelling to tiny, ruined villages and speaking to survivors of that era, but in the end, Victoria had to face the terrifying Rooster House. It was there she finally found out what happened to her family and how they bore its imprints to this day. Red Sirens is a Ukrainian family history, embroidering its tragic and little understood past with the true colours of human experience: the families torn apart, the traditions that endure and the complex relationship with a Soviet past and children making new lives in the West. Profound, compassionate and threaded with unexpected joy, it is a love letter to a family and their country.