Seagulls

An extraordinary debut, Seagulls delves into the myriad diasporas of love and war—the war being Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine. Chayka’s compelling collection of stories captures the war’s dystopias and displacements, its heartbreaks and violences with beautiful, richly specific language. Inspired by Chekhov’s famous play, the characters seem almost to oscillate in time, hovering like seagulls over their own uncertain destinies.

—Cristina García, author of Vanishing Maps

In these voltaic, interconnected stories, women and men scattered from Kyiv to Connecticut, Barcelona to Batumi navigate the messy overlap of desire, money, and survival in the long aftershock of the Russian invasion. Told in propulsive, confessional voices, the stories blend dark humor with erotic charge, economic hustle with emotional ruin, and the brutal pragmatics of migration with the fragile, ridiculous hope of starting over. The collection is unsparing about violence—state, domestic, and structural—yet obsessed with pleasure, agency, and the strange ways desire can feel like both wound and lifeline. Together, these stories form a polyphonic portrait of a generation learning to live amid bombs, visas, gigs, and betrayals, asking over and over: what does it mean to be clean, to be free, to be good, when survival itself feels like a dirty bargain?

—Miah Jeffra, author of American Gospel

Seagulls is one of the most exhilarating yet moving story collections I’ve read in a long time. Prepare to be awestruck by the beauty, freshness and ingenuity of Nina Chayka’s writing—and to have your heart torn to pieces and mended back to you by the humor, determination, vivacity and fierceness of the Ukrainian and Russian women who populate these stories. You’ll never look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine the same way after reading this book.

—Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, author of Barefoot Dogs

Nina Chayka’ s Seagulls is a luminous, unflinching tapestry of lives and times woven by a singular and astute sensibility. From Dnipro to Istanbul to New York, at the mercy of techno-capitalism, geopolitical absurdity and racialized hierarchies, Chayka’s characters wrestle with the fallout of war, the falling apart of home. Rife with irony, humor and a stunning juxtaposition of vulnerability and stoicism, these deftly-laced stories will make you reassess escape and survival.

—Tayyba Kanwal, author of Talking with Boys