Three compelling storylines move back and forth between the first months of the pandemic in 2020, and Ukraine and Brooklyn in 1932 and 1933. Matt, 12 (white), is an only child living with his mother and great-grandmother, Nadiya, known as GG, during lockdown. He’s lonely, bored, chafing at his mother’s rules, and alternately angry at and worried about his dad, a journalist based in Paris. GG is sometimes tender and sometimes moody, especially when Matt asks questions about the diaries, letters, and a photograph in her boxes of belongings. These tell the tale of three cousins: Mila, the privileged daughter of a Ukrainian Soviet official in Kyiv, has never doubted the goodness of her father, the government, or Papa Stalin; Nadiya has lost her family to famine in the Ukrainian countryside; Helen, daughter of a Ukrainian immigrant family in Brooklyn, chafes at a recent New York Times piece denying the Ukrainian famine and is determined to set the record straight while helping bring her cousin Nadiya to America. As Matt follows his father’s journalistic advice for building trust with GG, the cousins’ stories, with twists, turns, and GG’s painful secret at their core, unfold. And as Matt builds a deeper relationship with GG, he moves outside his own worry and frustration and into conversations with his parents that help him better deal with the uncertainty of the pandemic. An author’s note tells more about the Soviet-engineered Ukrainian famine, the Holodomor. (Ages 9-13)

*A National Book Award Finalist*

From the author of Nowhere Boy - called “a resistance novel for our times” by The New York Times - comes a brilliant middle-grade survival story that traces a harrowing family secret back to the Holodomor, a terrible famine that devastated Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s.

Thirteen-year-old Matthew is miserable. His journalist dad is stuck overseas indefinitely, and his mom has moved in his one-hundred-year-old great-grandmother to ride out the pandemic, adding to his stress and isolation.

But when Matthew finds a tattered black-and-white photo in his great-grandmother’s belongings, he discovers a clue to a hidden chapter of her past, one that will lead to a life-shattering family secret. Set in alternating timelines that connect the present-day to the 1930s and the US to the USSR, Katherine Marsh’s latest novel sheds fresh light on the Holodomor – the horrific famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, and which the Soviet government covered up for decades.

An incredibly timely, page-turning story of family, survival, and sacrifice, inspired by Marsh’s own family history, The Lost Year is perfect for fans of Ruta Sepetys' Between Shades of Gray and Alan Gratz's Refugee.