Rock, Paper, Grenade: A Novel [Paperback]

Ukrainian writer and military serviceman Artem Chekh’s book was the winner of the 2021 BBC News Ukraine Book of the Year Award and is a gritty and bald bildungsroman, a lilting picaresque of a life lived in the shadow of someone else’s war.

When Tymofiy is five years old, his small family in Cherkasy, Ukraine grows by one. Not with the birth of a baby sister or brother, but with the appearance of Felix—mentor and tormentor, enemy and friend—Tymofiy’s grandmother’s sometime-boyfriend. “Who are you?” Felix screams in the depths of a confused and drunken rage at all who cross his path, his memories of the Soviet-Afghan war clouding his eyes and senses. “Who are you?” Tymofiy asks himself as he drifts through the streets of his hometown, searching for love and protection, for a better, happier way of life.

A gritty, realist depiction of Ukraine and the post Soviet world, this book offers an affecting yet honest look into the life of someone suffering from PTSD. It is a story of growing up without much hope for a better future, and yet intense moments of connection and kindness persist. Just when things begin to seem insurmountably dark, a friendship begins, a kind word is said, or a hand reaches out and opens the curtains, letting in a little light. Rock, Paper, Grenade is not a novel that attempts to be idealistic or cynical about father-son relationship. Instead of depicting Felix as entirely villainous, Chekh opts to sketch him as is a tragic figure, simultaneously threatening and utterly removed. In this, homophobia and even traditional masculinity are seen as forces of intense social isolation, turning familial relationships into battlegrounds. At a time when anti-queerness in the US has reached frightening extremes, and as war exacerbates some of the cruelest and most brutal aspects