Inspired by his own family history, Omer Bartov draws on extensive research, letters, diaries and confessions in this novel to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding a family’s murder in an Ukrainian village in 1944. As the lives of the unknown victims are uncovered, Bartov reveals the impact of these crimes on three generations of survivors, perpetrators, and their descendants.

Born in Israel, Omer Bartov is an acclaimed historian of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and a professor of history at Brown University. His book Anatomy of a Genocide won the National Jewish Book Award in 2018. The Butterfly and the Axe is his first English-language novel.