Serhii Synhaivskyi. The Road to Asmara

Serhii Synhaivskyi

Work proposed for translation:

The Road to Asmara
A novel (2016)
Length: 608 pp.
Copyright: Author: syn23@ukr.net

Serhii Synhaivskyi (born 1957) is a contemporary Ukrainian writer and translator. He studied at the Faculty of Romance and Germanic Languages at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. From 1984 to 1987, he served as a military translator in Ethiopia. His personal experience of witnessing the horrific consequences of socialist reforms in that country, as well as the war for independence in Eritrea, which was then part of Ethiopia, formed the basis for his novel The Road to Asmara. The author worked on the text for many years. It is the writer’s only published work, released in 2016. The novel received numerous positive reviews from fellow writers, literary critics and readers, and was shortlisted for the BBC Book of the Year (2023).

The protagonist of the novel The Road to Asmara, Mykyta, is handed the diary of his real father by his mother before she dies. From this diary, he learns that his father worked as a military interpreter in Ethiopia and took part in the country’s political transformations, which were accompanied by repression, deportations, mass starvation, and eventually killed millions of people. By reading the diary, Mykyta tries to understand his father and rebuild his own identity. As a tool of the murderous Soviet system, his father simultaneously cares for the victims of the famine who died before his eyes, reminding him of his relatives who died of the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s.