When the author and podcaster Viv Groskop first visited Ukraine, she travelled there from Moscow, on a long train that ran eventually beside a field of sunflowers. They were, she recalls in her lovely and modestly scaled memoir, like a ‘blast of sunshine screaming: “Welcome to Ukraine! You are no longer in Russia!”’
The year was 1994, and Groskop had been in the former USSR for a little under a year. A modern languages undergraduate at Cambridge, she had decided to take her year abroad in St Petersburg. Until she got there, she had barely thought of Ukraine. It was one of a bunch of newly independent states; it hadn’t come up on her course. But then she fell in love with a Ukrainian guitarist visiting St Petersburg for a gig, and found herself burning to visit that young country of sunflowers.
The book recounts the year or so leading up to her trip to Ukraine, in which Groskop mainly mooches around St Petersburg, smoking, drinking beer and teaching the odd English class to locals.
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