War & combat fiction
2021
The Dreamtime is a novel, written by Mstyslav Chernov, a war reporter working for Associate Press, and released in 2021 by Sammit-Knyha Publishing House. “Dreamtime” is a 460-page fusion of a documentary and a psychological thriller. The book is based on real events and has been written over an eight-year period. Drawing on the Indigenous Australians’ concept of the dreamtime, the novel explores a social collective experience of war and conflict and is based on real events witnessed by the author during the war in eastern Ukraine and the migration crisis in southern Europe over the recent years. It comprises four intertwined plots spanning in space from Ukraine’s war-torn Donbas to southern Europe and southeast Asia, tied together by themes of existential conflict and the blurred line between reality and dreams. The novel is published in Ukrainian. It was well-received by critics and praised for its realism in depicting war, for its creative literary depiction of how dreams reflect the psyche, and for its "serious" and "skillful” prose. The book was nominated for the BBC News Ukraine Book of the Year Award.