One Ukrainian Summer by Viv Groskop review

In this evocative, amusing memoir, the author and podcaster recounts her 1990s fling with a guitarist – and considers whether the Russia-Ukraine conflict could have been foreseen

In the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, author and podcaster Viv Groskop found herself dreaming of a train trip she made as an undergraduate in 1994. The three-day journey took her from St Petersburg, where she’d spent frozen months grappling with Russian grammar as part of her study year abroad, to the Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, where a guitarist she’d fallen for had promised to take her on tour with his band, “Ukraine’s answer to the Red Hot Chili Peppers”. When the train finally crossed the border, it was fields of sunflowers that greeted her, “a glorious blur of yellow against the blue of the sky, like a firestorm”.

The trip becomes the fulcrum of this redolent, wryly honest memoir, in which she comes of age and chases love while striving for immersion in a region that was recalibrating its own identity, newly liberated by the collapse of the USSR to pursue its passion for Levi’s and all things western. As Groskop recalls: “People were anxious and sad and humiliated all at once, but also overexcited about Uncle Ben’s and Bounty.”