Part 1 of the Pioneer (Malisova) series
This star-crossed gay romance is a #1 bestselling TikTok sensation that made international news and catalyzed one of Russia's largest-ever crackdowns on LGBTQ representation
The banned gay romance that took Russia by storm . . .
In the waning days of the Soviet Union, two teenage boys find each other at Pioneer Camp, a patriotic summer program similar to the Boy Scouts. Yury Konev, 16, anticipates the weeks ahead of him with boredom and dread, but things change when he meets 19-year-old counselor Volodya. The two boys are drawn to each other, and though both fear the consequences of their illegal attraction, its gravity pulls them together.
Now, 20 years later, Yury returns to the abandoned camp to reminisce on the relationship that changed his life forever-and discovers that not all history is destined to remain in the past.
Cowritten by a Ukrainian–Russian duo and originally published by an independent publisher, Popcorn Books, Pioneer Summer became a TikTok sensation and runaway #1 bestseller in Russia. Catalyzed by this success, Russian Parliament officials and anti-LGBT activists began a campaign to ban the novel and others like it, an effort which became law just two months after the second book in the series was published. The authors were forced to flee the country, and Popcorn Books ceased publication.
But they-and we-will not be so easily cowed. Beginning in the summer of 2025, Pioneer Summer will become available for the first time in English, with the other two novels to follow. Katerina Sylvanova was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. She graduated from Kharkiv National Agrarian University and later moved to the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, where she worked in a shoe store and spent her free time writing. Elena Malisova was born in a provincial Soviet town in the late 1980s, where she lived until she moved to Moscow in the late 2000s. Growing up, she wrote poems that were published in small local newspapers. Sylvanova and Malisova met in 2016 and together began working on Summer in a Pioneer Tie. Both authors left Russia in 2022 after a flurry of death threats, with Sylvanova returning to Ukraine and Malisova moving to Germany.