Olia Hercules found her vocation after coming to London as a student in the early 2000s. Cooking, she explains, wasn’t learned at her mother’s knee: ‘The adults were busy, you were not to get in the way.’ But adrift in a foreign country, she found it therapeutic. Following an apprenticeship at Ottolenghi, she wrote award-winning cookbooks and has now produced a memoir. Written with a sizzling pen and a chef’s sensitivity to smell and flavour, it explores Ukraine’s modern history through four generations of her family. 

The bleakest tales are those of the first generation, who lived through Stalinism and the Nazi invasion. Incredible but far from unusual is the story of Hercules’s maternal grandfather. Taken captive defending Kyiv from the Wehrmacht in 1941, he escaped from a POW camp, rejoined the Red Army and fought all the way to Vienna, where he was disgusted to see fellow soldiers pointlessly smashing shop windows (and, presumably, much worse). After the war came famine, arrest for cutting collectivised grass to feed the family cow and four years of slave labour on the Far Eastern island of Sakhalin, digging a never-completed tunnel to the mainland. Freed following Stalin’s death in 1953, he jumped the transport train home to avoid likely murder at the hands of his fellow prisoners, mostly violent criminals. Later, he boycotted grandiloquent annual Victory Day celebrations and never wore his medals. ‘All the real heroes,’ he told his children, fell in the war’s first days. ‘We just tried to survive.’ 

The next generation had it easier, keeping their opinions to themselves and working the system. Hercules’s mother and aunts created chic ensembles on their sewing machines, and her father had a hustle renovating Volga cars and selling them on the black market. But hanging over these modest pleasures was the