Phoenix author Kalani Pickhart’s debut novel is a fascinating, genre-bending ride through the 2013 protests in Ukraine that led to a deadly winter and, ultimately, the Ukrainian Revolution. I Will Die in a Foreign Land (Two Dollar Radio, $25) is a fictionalized account of those days, told through dispatches from iconic sites, traditional songs, news articles and illustrative quotations. Pickhart, who is of Slavic descent, wrote the book through research fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Intelligence for Eastern European and Eurasian Studies. It’s a gripping take on modern historical fiction that will be especially compelling to those interested in Eastern European politics.
