Namenlos
Live or Serve
A novel about war and conscience.
Spring in the third year of the war. Three men who would never have chosen one another climb into the Carpathians. Ahead of them eight days of forest, hunger and cold – and the border, behind which life may belong to them again.
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What would you have done?
Spring in the third year of the war. Three men who would never have chosen one another – a fitness trainer, a programmer, a shop assistant – climb into the Carpathians. Behind them a country that takes its men off the street and into the army. Ahead of them eight days of forest, hunger and cold – and the border, behind which life may belong to them again.
On the fourth day a dog joins them. She knows paths that appear on no map. She stands up to a bear. And she does not leave the side of the weakest of them.
“Live or Serve” tells of three men who are neither heroes nor cowards – only people who want to live. A literary survival novel about guilt, fear and the one question no one can answer: what would you have done?
For readers of Cormac McCarthy and Erich Maria Remarque. A novel that does not judge.
Original title: Uchyljant – Ukrainian for someone who evades the war.
The artefact — the compass
Ljocha packed it like everything else: map, compass, antibiotics. He checks it every fifteen minutes. He does not let it fall – not even when the bear comes. A compass is physics, he says. A magnetic field. It cannot lie. Then they walk south-west for four hours and stand on the same stone again. The compass did not lie. The map did not lie. And the dog goes west – to where the needle does not point.
In a basement shop in Kyiv lies an old compass whose needle never comes to rest. There is no sign above the door: Namenlos.
The soundtrack to the book
Fourteen songs to the story
Eight days in the Carpathians, told in music: fourteen songs, sung in English — a music project in its own right, made for the novel.
