Maria Matios

This is a story of Ukrainian families during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The reader is submerged into a world populated by a grand cast of characters and ideas.

Hardly Ever Otherwise

Painting a tortured picture of life’s harsh brutality in the region, Maria provides an insight into the complicated history of this remote corner of the Carpathian Mountains. Against the colourful backdrop of local traditions and highlanders’ rites she weaves her story of love, intertwined with a heart wrenching human tragedy, not avoiding intimate details of the anatomy of relationships between men and women. Enchanted by the impeccable style of this family saga, the reader becomes baffled by the character’s actions. In the words of Maria Matios the book is about people’s deeply concealed nature. When familiar passions like love and hate, joy and envy overcome them and it’s not in their nature to resist, consequences reach the catastrophic magnitude. Each character is flawed, detestable, but in the book’s finale they incite compassion as their painful past is steadily revealed. The eternal dilemma of sin and atonement pervades the pages of this book. The author does not shy away from carnal encounters and masterfully describes the psychology of lovers, accentuating people’s struggles on different levels.

This is a chronicle of Soviet tyranny in Ukraine. Vasyl Kapkan, the Lithuanian translator of Sweet Darusya

Maria Matios

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