Lena Tkachenko has one skill: she can make soup from nothing.

When Russia's bombs turn her hotel into rubble, she boards a converted freight train and starts cooking. 4,300 kilometres of track. Bunkers where children eat with shaking hands. A burning carriage where she delivers a baby she never expected to love.

Beside her, Marek Shevchenko fixes what breaks and says less than he should. They do not fall in love. They fall into necessity, which is harder to leave.

Lena loses her hearing. Marek loses his lungs. Neither stops.

They serve 127,000 meals across a country on fire. They teach a parrot to swear in three languages. They learn that spite can replace hope and beauty can outlast cruelty. And in a logbook passed hand to hand through burning carriages, they record everything.

Eleven years later, the baby is thirteen. Her name is Maria. She finds the logbook in a box her mother never opened. She reads every entry. Then she boards a train and retraces their route, station by station, to find out if the people in it were real, or if her mother invented them to make the war bearable.

The Iron People is a dual-timeline literary novel spanning 2022 to 2035, set across wartime Ukraine. It is a story about feeding strangers when the world tells you to stop, loving someone when your body is failing, and the difference between a legend and a life.

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