Petrichor: The Scent of the Earth After Rain. A Novel
About this ebook
Blending realism with myth, memory, and dark humor, Rafeyenko peoples wartime Ukraine with figures both real and imagined: Ezra Pound and Hans Christian Andersen, figures from the Mahabharata, talking animals and haunted landscapes. As the characters navigate survival and displacement, cruelty and care, the novel asks what it means to coexist—with one another, with the dead, and with history itself.
Lyrical, unsettling, and deeply humane, Petrichor is a powerful meditation on war, loss, and the fragile persistence of life.
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About the author
Volodymyr Rafeyenko is a Ukrainian writer, poet, translator, literary and film critic. Although he initially wrote and published in Russian, his novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love was his first in Ukrainian. His work has been recognized with a Peterson Literary Fund award, the Volodymyr Korolenko Prize, and the Visegrad Eastern Partnership Literary Award, as well as shortlisted for the 2023 EBRD Literature Prize and longlisted for the Taras Shevchenko National Prize. Rafeyenko is a research scholar at the University of Pittsburgh and writer-in-residence at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh.
Mark Andryczyk administers the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and teaches Ukrainian literature at its Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He is also the author of The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction.
