Viking signs 'definitive' retelling of the Eastern Front from researcher Lyuba Vinogradova

Viking has landed Motherland: The Untold History, an "uncensored" retelling of the Eastern Front, by "preeminent" Soviet archival research Lyuba Vinogradova. 

Editorial director Connor Brown acquired world English rights following an exclusive submission from Michael Dean at Andrew Nurnberg Associates. Motherland will be published in 2027. 

Drawing on three decades of Vinogradova’s research, including unpublished diaries and exlcusive interviews with survivors, Motherland is a "definitive" retelling of the Eastern Front 1941–1945 from the perspective of Soviet women. 

"It is said the women in occupied territories responded in two ways: they made themselves ’bright’, to attract the attentions of soldiers and the rewards of food and safety this would bring, or they tried to appear ’grey’, covering themselves in soot or dirt to avoid predatory advances", the publisher wrote. "We read about food shortages so bad that children are kept at home for fear of cannibals, and babies who perished in such large numbers through winter that they were kept in barrels, to be buried in mass graves come spring."

Vinogradova said: “My teenage years in a Moscow suburb coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Eating the most basic food and unable to buy anything decent to wear, we had the luxury of unlimited new books and publications, on everything that had been forbidden, including our country’s history... I am resisting this distortion of history, promoting and expanding what I learned back in the 1990s. I know I am not alone, and I know that my book is needed both in my country and outside of it."