The Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famine

Katherine Marsh is an American author. She has published six middle grade novels including, The Twilight Prisoner; The Night Tourist; Jepp, Who Defied Stars; The Door by the Staircase; Nowhere Boy; and most recently, The Lost Year. Marsh grew up in New York and studied English at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. After teaching English for a year, she turned to a career in journalism, writing and editing for publications including Good Housekeeping, Rolling Stone, The Washington City Paper, and The New Republic. She concluded her work in journalism following her grandmother’s death in 2001, at which time she began writing children’s books in order to process her loss and grief. Her novels have since won an array of awards, including the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery, the Jane Addams Award for Children’s Chapter Books, and the Middle East Book Award.

Originally published in 2023 by Macmillan, Marsh’s novel The Lost Year is based upon her own family’s history. Marsh grew up with her Ukrainian grandmother, Natalia Stepanivna Ostapiuk, or Natasha, throughout the 1980s. Like Mila, Natasha had a unique opportunity: “[T]o leave the Soviet Union and come to America when she did was a rare feat” (341). In her Author’s Note, Marsh reiterates that the characters in The Lost Year are fictional, but that her grandmother’s and her great-aunt’s experiences in Ukraine in the 1930s inspired Mila, Helen, and Nadiya’s accounts. Like GG, Natasha’s experiences of the Holodomor were “so traumatic that she didn’t talk to her own children about the famine till they were adults” (346) and couldn’t relay her memories without bursting into tears. The Lost Year is therefore Marsh’s way of preserving her family’s history and the history of the Ukrainian people. Throughout her work on the novel, Marsh discovered that little historical documentation of the Holodomor has survived. In the 1930s, Ukrainian victims of Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical rule were forced to rely upon oral histories that they “passed down in secret between survivors and their descendants” (347) in order to preserve their stories. In The Lost Year, Marsh’s fictional characters’ accounts authenticate facets of Ukrainian history that the Russian government continues to challenge, erase, or deny.

In her Author’s Note, Marsh explains why writing The Lost Year felt important to her in light of current events, particularly the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, which began in 2022. When she began The Lost Year, Marsh thought that she was documenting the past and “never imagined that [she] would find [her]self in the same situation as [her] grandmother” (349), worrying about her relatives’ safety overseas and feeling incapable of helping them. The Lost Year provides context for the present crisis along the Russia-Ukraine border.