Your Presence Is Mandatory

Winner of the 2025 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Gold Medal Winner for the 94th Annual California Book Awards Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

A riveting debut novel, based on real events, about the price of secrecy, the weight of lies, and one man's drive to protect his family from his past.

Ukraine, 2007. War veteran Yefim Shulman was beloved by his children, wife, and coworkers. But in the days after his death, his widow, Nina, finds a letter to the KGB in his briefcase. Yefim had a lifelong secret, and his confession forces Nina and her children to reassess the husband, father, and grandfather they thought they knew and the bonds they'd formed with him and each other.

Following one family over the course of 70 years and three generations, Sasha Vasilyuk shines a light into the shadowy corners of a marriage marred by secrecy and the sacrifices people make to survive. Compassionate, gripping, and intimate, Your Presence Is Mandatory is "at once a historical epic, an engrossing family saga, and an astute examination of morality, survival, hope, and love" (Lara Prescott).