The Lost Year

Thirteen-year-old Matthew is stuck at home in New Jersey with his mom and great-grandmother during the Covid pandemic, while his father, a newspaper correspondent, is away and cannot return because of the border closures. His great-grandmother, nicknamed GG, has never talked about her childhood, but Matthew finds out she survived a harrowing time known as the Holodomor, a terrible famine that killed millions of Ukrainians and was subsequently covered up by the Soviet regime. Inspired by the author’s own family history, Marsh expertly weaves a story of the Soviet Ukraine of the 1930s and the present-day United States.