Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

Prominent Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko added some of her own books to the bookcrossing pile at Ye bookstore. Oleksiy Boyko While the number of people who understand, speak and read English is always growing in Kyiv, finding English-language books here is increasingly difficult. Unless you’re ready to order books online and pay for their long-distance shipment, your best options are to borrow from friends, search the few shops selling English literature or try bookcrossing at Ye bookshop.

Originally, an idea of bookcrossing was created by the website www.bookcrossing.com, launched in 2001 by American book enthusiasts. Its main concept is to get you register a book in their system and leave it anywhere – in a cafe or on a bench, including the specially marked “Bookcrossing Zones,” where it can be picked up by someone else.

The bookcrossing at Ye shop is much more organized. You’re expected to leave a book not just anywhere, but on the special shelves found in the foreign literature section of the store. You can mark your book with a sticker. On it, you may indicate your name and even a phone number. Then you can borrow any other book from the bookcrossing shelves.

The original stock of books available for borrowing came from donations by Ukrainian writers and representatives of different embassies. The pile keeps growing. Only some are in English. There are plenty of Ukrainian-language books, as well as books in Polish, French, Dutch and other languages.

But what’s best about it is that, just like a flea market, bookcrossing gives you a chance to find something completely unexpected. Besides, Ye’s initiative is useful to those who need to get rid of books either because they’re moving or to free up some space. Throwing away books breaks the heart of any reader. After all, literature you’ve read already can be a real treasure for someone else.

Bookcrossing is free, and helps expands the limited options of finding English books in Kyiv.


Sadly missed

An option similar to bookcrossing was once offered at the former book cafe Baboon, which had a separate room for used books and videos, that you could either purchase or exchange for your own. There were also plenty of newest bestsellers for sale. But like many good places in Kyiv that we all loved, Baboon is now gone, replaced by some glamorous cafe with no books to offer.

Antresol, the only book cafe of the Baboon chain that still remains open, decided to cut down on its small but usually smart English books selection. I discovered only about 20-30 books on the shelves, including a copy of “Lord of the Rings.”

Knizhniy Supermarket (Book Supermarket) chain has one of its largest stores at Petrivka, next to Butterfly cinema and Megamarket. It also used to be the place of one of the biggest selections of English literature. Books like Jack Kerouac’s “Of Mice and Men,” Ira Levin’s “The Stepford Wives” or “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy” by Douglas Adams were easy to find there.

When I dropped by there a few days ago, I was thoroughly disappointed. While the rest of the bookstore was as busy and full as before, the foreign literature corner looked sad and lonely. In fact it contained quite a number of volumes – mostly hardcover books – such as a very dated East London guide, “Professional Secretary’s Tips and Lists,” and a user’s guide for software no longer in use. Apart from these miserable leftovers that no one would ever buy, there were only a few editions of classics for English learners.

Still kicking

Ye bookstore does in fact have a whole separate room dedicated to foreign literature. The shelves on the left mainly display textbooks, self-help books and dictionaries in popular languages, while most of the fiction is on the right. The selection included an odd mixture of classics and most recent bestsellers such as “Twilight” by Stephenie Meyer (now a hit teenage flick), “The Quick and the Dead” by Joy Williams, lots of Agatha Christie, fantasy novels by Terry Brooks and Trudy Caravan, the full Harry Potter series and beautifully illustrated English editions of children’s books of A-Ba-Ba-Ha-La-Ma-Ha (a famous Ukrainian publishing house).

The prices at Ye were notably lower than in other places trading books in foreign languages. A heavy volume of horror stories anthology that caught my attention cost about Hr 78. There were also books in German, Polish, French and other languages, as well as books on art, culture and sciences. Ye bookstore is different from many Kyiv bookstores in one more aspect: It focuses on the literature in Ukrainian, with only a slim selection of books in Russian. It also has a decent selection of maps and cool posters like “Simpsons: All Characters” and famed “I Want to Believe” poster from the “X-Files.”

Bukva (Letter) shop in Globus has a constant assortment of English books (for constantly high prices) that include lots of Penguin classics, as well as popular fiction by Candice Bushnell, Helen Fielding, J.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling. Popular mystery and horror writers, as well as books on history, art and culture are also on offer.

Petrivka market, known for the highest concentration of literature and movies in the city, has a number of stalls catering to foreign language learners. Most of their assortment included textbooks and self-help language books, but in addition they would usually have a range of Penguin classics, as well some modern authors of romance and mystery novels.

Previously acclaimed the best place to shop for English literature in Kyiv, Globe Bookstore store still fully deserves the title. The place itself, located between a newspaper kiosk and a regular Ukrainian bookshop, remains practically the only place for pleasant English book-shopping in the city. It’s very small but nicely furnished to provide the perfect atmosphere for browsing the shelves. And that’s exactly what I prefer to do every time I go there. Of course, there is a shop assistant to answer any of your book inquiries. But since the place is so tiny, it doesn’t take much time to look it over.

Popular titles and authors rule Globe Bookstore. The selection features books by John Grisham, Dan Brown, James Ellroy, Paulo Coehlo and many others. A separate section is dedicated to fantasy, horror and vampire novels. Also expect to find the latest books by Sophie Kinsella, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mark Haddon and John Irving. A corner of Russian literature translated into English features the classics – Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov and more modern: Ukrainian Andrey Kurkov and Russian Sergei Lukyanenko with his “Night Watch” series. By the way, no books at the shop have prices on them. In most cases you can find them out yourself, by comparing the original price of the book in pounds to the price chart on the wall. For example 7.99 pounds amounts to about Hr 90.


Ye (3 Lysenka, 235-8854).

Bukva (Globus, Maidan Nezalezhnosti metro, 371-1141).

Globe Bookstore (Lva Tolstoho, Metrograd, 241-8412).