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Independence Square by AD Miller review – thriller in post-Soviet Ukraine

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/19/independence-square-ad-miller-review

From Kiev to London by way of Greeneland … the Booker-shortlisted author’s protagonist searches for answers

Ukrainian independence was a scenario that no one envisaged – until it became a reality. Over the subsequent decades, hopes for Ukraine’s transition to democracy have waxed and waned. What never seems to have crossed anyone’s mind is that the pathogens of its post-Soviet political system – dead-eyed cynicism, bad faith, the distorting power of big and unaccountable fortunes –would start to infect Europe and beyond.

“My country is like a small character from the beginning of the movie,” says Olesya, a Ukrainian political activist in AD Miller’s new novel. “You forget him, he is mixed up with the others, but he comes back for the end. He knows something, he is a clue, and in the end you see that he mattered after all.” Just how much Ukraine matters internationally is only now becoming clear to most of us, with goings-on in Kiev taking centre stage at the impeachment hearings of the US’s 45th president. Miller has shown eerie prescience before, in his Booker-shortlisted Snowdrops, an insightful thriller about post-Soviet Russia, but even he must be astonished at this turn of events.

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