Sam Wachman was in Romania helping to organize an English immersion camp for youth from Ukraine, drinking tea with some of the kids. A year had past since the start of the war and, after hearing their stories, he suggested they write a book. “They said, we’re busy,” he recalls, “you write it.” 

Six months later, Wachman had a first draft of The Sunflower Boys, which was released on August 12. In it, a Ukrainian boy on the cusp of his teens, Artem, sees life forever changed when war comes to his hometown. After tragedy strikes his family, his priorities shift as Artem must now escape the country with his younger brother in hopes of reuniting with their father. It’s a riveting, and heartbreaking story. In fact, there are two, equally compelling stories that intertwine in The Sunflower Boys because, while Wachman was able to complete the novel after that conversation over tea, he had actually started work on what would be his debut novel before the war began. 

Raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wachman, who has Ukrainian grandparents, spent time living in the country and teaching English there. “I was living there as a gay man and I had a student confide in me about their own sexual orientation and I thought this is a really different place to come of age as a gay person than Cambridge, Massachusetts,” he says. Wachman also wanted to write about the country for which he has a great affinity, a country that is underrepresented in English-language literature. So, he began writing a coming-of-age story about Artem, a gay adolescent who is figuring out his life. That is the first section of The Sunflower Boys now. Artem, a budding artist, realizes that his feelings for his best friend go beyond friendship and his figuring out what that means in the present moment and for his future. Then, on a February night, explosions rock Chernihiv, the city in northern Ukraine where he lives. 

Wachman stopped writing the novel when the war began. At the time, he was studying in Denmark and his friends and former students were amongst those now leaving the country. He traveled to Poland and Germany to meet up with them and help in the ways that he could. “I do want to emphasize here that I’m not like the American savior swooping in,” he says. “I had very few skills, but I could speak Ukrainian and English and I was a college EMT, so I had some basic first aid skills and such.”

While all this was happening, Wachman was contacted by an agent, but he had apprehensions about continuing work on the novel. “There’s always going to be this elephant in the room and I don’t feel necessarily equipped to write about the war yet,” Wachman recalls of his feelings at the time, “and at that point writing felt like an act of frivolity almost, like there was so much more concrete work to be done.”

Back in Massachusetts, he worked to help resettle Ukrainian families in the U.S., all the while hearing stories from them that didn’t make it onto news broadcasts. “Eventually, I was also frustrated with this space that Ukraine had come to occupy in the American cultural consciousness,” Wachman says. “The Ukraine that I had known, the version of Ukraine that I had known, was so different from the smoldering cities that were being broadcast on the news and I realized that a lot of Americans didn’t think of Ukraine as the beautiful country that I knew.”

It took the kids in Romania to get Wachman back to work on The Sunflower Boys, but the story was already there. 

Although it’s fiction, there was formal research involved in writing the novel. “Everything that they go through in the second half of the book is something that one of my friends or one of my kids has gone through,” he says. “What I did was, I asked each of my relevant Ukrainian friends or Ukrainian students if I could actually have an interview with them that I could record to use for a possible book and get their real testimony of what happened where and when and how it was, little details that you might miss by having just taken the details from the news or relying on that.”

To keep a distance between fiction and reality, Wachman opted not to set the story in the city where he lived. This served a practical purpose too, as Chernihiv was harder hit in the early months of the war. “I found some people through sites like Reddit who were from villages around there and I organized interviews with them,” he says.

What’s striking about The Sunflower Boys is the level of detail that Wachman, who traveled widely throughout Ukraine and speaks the language fluently, adds to the story, from the descriptions of cities and rural settings to cultural practices. This allows the novel to be more than a war story and, through that, he’s illustrating what war disrupts. This is, in a way, Wachman’s response to characterizations of the country in the U.S. “If the media comes from before 2022, it’s about Chernobyl and if it comes from after that, it’s about war,” he says. “That’s certainly not the country that I love. Certainly, both of those things are real, but that’s not a fair angle.”

Similarly, the war may change Artem’s life, but doesn’t erase who he was before it started. He’s still processing his feelings for his best friend and learning to open up about his identity to people. “For me it was essential to have that story first and not just scratch it and replace it with a war story,” says Wachman. “I wanted to show that there was this internal turmoil happening beforehand and he’s this fully fleshed out person who had this internal struggle that a lot of 13- year-olds are going through in the world, in every country, and then the war story interrupts that.”

It’s important to mention, too, that, when Wachman finished The Sunflower Boys, the United States was not the same country that it is now. “Clearly, Ukrainians are no longer welcome in the same way in Trump’s America and U.S.-Ukraine relations are very different,” says Wachman.

Just last week, multiple news outlets reported that the 200,000+ Ukrainian refugees who resettled in the United States were set to lose their protected status. 

At the time of this interview, early in the summer of 2025, Wachman was not sure how he felt about his portrayal of the United States, which is where Artem and Yuri’s father lives and where they are heading. “I did try my best to cast it in a very neutral light with the epilogue. It does not meet Artem’s expectations in some very concrete ways,” he says.“It also functions as a place where he’s not going to get shot at. So, it’s got that duality. It is safe in one way, but it’s kind of a letdown in another way.”

He adds, “The concept of the U.S. as a safe place for Ukrainians, it would not fly now.”

In light of that, though, The Sunflower Boys is an essential story about war and its impact on young people. 

The Sunflower Boys by Sam Wachman is out now.

Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram  or Bluesky for more updates.

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