The Dreamtime

A KirkusBest Indie Book of the Year & a Library JournalBest World Literature read, from Pulitzer Prize-winning AP Journalist and Director/Producer/Writer of the Academy Award-winning documentary20 Days in Mariupol

“[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 ofGrey 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 Dreamtimeis 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 Dreamtimeties 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 Dreamtimehas 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.

Author Biography

Mstyslav Chernov, which won the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. He was named Ukrainian Photographer of the Year in 2013 and 2015. He was born in Eastern Ukraine.

More information on Chernov’s journalism and exhibitions can be found on his website mstyslav.com and his Instagram instagram.com/mstyslav.chernov.