Paper Dolls: How We Were Taught Not to Notice Violence – Olha Kari (Ukrainian Edition)

This is a new collection of short prose by Olha Kari, the author of Yours, Mine, Nobody’s and Others, written in Ukrainian. It takes the reader into the depths of family and generational memory, where personal stories are woven together with shared traumas.

Kari looks at how decades of life under the Soviet system shaped people’s, and above all women’s, experience through fear, shame, silence, self-denial and blame. Many forms of violence became so familiar that they were accepted as normal; silence was treated as a survival strategy, and guilt fell on those who had been harmed. In short, personal stories she untangles these inherited collective scripts and shows how deep their roots go. It is a book about women who learned to survive when they wanted to live, to love and to be themselves.

Many readers will recognise their own mothers, grandmothers and themselves in these pages. A book to read slowly, and to talk about afterwards.

You may also like

• Yours, Mine, Nobody’s and Others – Olha Kari
• The Thread That Held – Stories of Children in War
• The 5 Wounds of the Soul – Lise Bourbeau

Edition details

• Language: Ukrainian
• Author: Olha Kari
• Publisher: Old Lion Publishing House (Vydavnytstvo Staroho Leva)
• Year: 2026
• Pages: 144
• Format: 130×200 mm
• ISBN: 978-966-448-652-8