The Dreamtime: A Novel

From AP Journalist and Director/Producer of 20 Days in Mariupol, Winner of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival's Audience Award in World Cinema Documentary "A powerful psychological thriller about borderline situations in life, hopes and dreams. Written against the backdrop of the war, before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the story acquires an additional passionate and humanistic significance." - Andrey Kurkov, author of Grey Bees "Scene by scene, Chernov vividly describes battles fought in the streets, the bombing and shelling of apartments, and the dreams of those on the front lines, physically and psychologically. ... [T]his timely novel from a Ukrainian author excels at examining the connection between reality and dreams and exploring the effects of war on the human psyche." Library Journal The Dreamtime is a fusion of documentary and psychological fiction inspired by the author's experience as an international war correspondent. Alluding to the Indigenous Australian concept of dreamtime, the novel offers a unique point of view on the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, through four intertwining narratives: a guilt-ridden doctor trying to exorcise his demons by exposing himself to war; a young woman tending to her ailing father as the bombs fall around them in Russian-occupied Slovyansk; a mysterious sociopath playing a cat-and-mouse game with an ex-lover; and a forensic expert solving a murder case while trying to save her marriage with a discharged soldier. As these threads unfurl, through harrowing scenes of personal and collective trauma, an enigmatic pattern emerges. The plots span in space from Ukraine's war-torn Donbas to southern Europe and southeast Asia, tied together by themes of existential conflict and the blurred line between reality and dreams. The novel was first published in Kyiv in 2020 as the focal point for a video-art exhibition on the media's role in creating public collective experiences. It was well received by critics and audiences and praised for its realism in depicting war, for its creative literary depiction of how dreams reflect the psyche, and for its masterly prose.