Raven

In 1921 after four years of war the Bolsheviks conquer Ukraine, but Raven and Veremii hide in the forests with other Cossacks and continue their struggle. When Veremii dies in battle the communists secretly follow the burial party, but when they dig up the coffin they find a cryptic note instead of a corpse.
Meanwhile Raven, thinks he is dead when a grenade blows him off his horse, so is surprised to wake up in the witch Yevdosia's house.... That night a woman appears in his dreams and makes love to him, only to disappear, leaving him with the scent of orchids. While riding back to his camp he meets his old comrade, Dosia, a beautiful Cossack girl and they have a brief conversation in the snowy forest. When they part she throws him her cap as a keepsake, and when he presses it to his face he inhales the fragrance of orchids.
Raven is a cocktail of fact and fiction for the author, Vasyl Shkliar has used authentic KGB reports to piece together the stories of these warriors who dwelt in underground tunnels and whose guerrilla tactics foreshadowed the Vietcong's use of subterranean passages many decades later. The Soviet Union prohibited any mention of the Cossacks' names but they lived on in stories whispered furtively by the hearth and dusty police files. "Raven" grips you from the first page as a novel and tells the story of Europe's most remarkable resistance movement for the first time.
Quotes
"A powerful work of art with a captivating subject and precisely detailed psychological portraits" Ukrainska Moloda
" .. an absolutely unprecedented bestseller" Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukrainian writer in the Ukrainian Gazette
"Shkliar's favourite literary award is the title of 'the Author whose books are most frequently stolen from bookshops'" Vox
Translated from Ukrainian by Stephen Komarnyckyj and Susie Speight of Kalyna Language Press