Author Diana Stevan of Campbell River will be reading from her latest novel, Sunflowers Under Fire, at the Courtenay Public Library on Friday, May 17 at 2 p.m.

Prior to the reading, she鈥檒l be giving a short PowerPoint presentation on how she used family history to write her novel based on her grandmother鈥檚 life in western Russia (present-day Ukraine) duringthe First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the civil wars and the Polish occupation.

Raised in Winnipeg, Stevan shared a bedroom with her baba until she was 15, but her grandmother never talked about life in the old country.

鈥淪he helped raise me but I never knew the horrors she faced before she came to Canada in 1929,鈥� Stevan said. 鈥淪he probably kept things inside, much like soldiers do when they come back from war. To talk about the past would鈥檝e reawakened the trauma of what they鈥檇 gone through.鈥�

After her baba died, Stevan鈥檚 mother, a natural-born storyteller, would talk about life in Volhynia, an oblast (province) of Ukraine and the impact of all the wars on the family. Stevan recorded them and later, encouraged by her own granddaughter, decided to write the story.

Stevan鈥檚 grandmother, Lukia Mazurets, was an uneducated Ukrainian farmwife and mother of eight, but her love of family, wits, and faith got her through one of the most tumultuous times in Russian history. It鈥檚 an inspirational story, one that shows the lengths an ordinary woman will go through to keep her family together.

And with the ongoing news about Russia and Ukraine, Sunflowers Under Fire shows how the seeds of this ongoing conflict were planted generations ago. It started well before the Tsars took power and continues to today.

Stevan hopes her story will also underline the difficult choices all immigrants make when they leave the land of their birth. 鈥淣o one leaves a country that serves them well. They leave when there鈥檚 little hope for themselves and/or their loved ones.鈥�

This is Stevan鈥檚 third novel. Her first novel, A Cry From The Deep, is a romantic mystery/ adventure set in Manhattan and Ireland; her second is The Rubber Fence, women鈥檚 fiction set on a psychiatric ward in a Winnipeg hospital. She鈥檚 also written a coming-of-age novelette, The Blue Nightgown, also set in Winnipeg. With their two daughters grown, Stevan lives with her husband Robert in Campbell River and West Vancouver. When she isn鈥檛 writing, she loves to travel, read, garden, and visit her family.