The Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famine

Ages 10 to 14

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.

Inspired by Marsh's own family history, The Lost Year is an incredibly timely, page-turning story of family, survival, and sacrifice.

About the Author

Katherine Marsh is the Edgar Award–winning author of The Night Tourist, Nowhere Boy, The Twilight Prisoner, Jepp, Who Defied the Stars, and The Doors by the Staircase. Katherine grew up in New York and now lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and two children. katherinemarsh.com @MarshKatherine