Once Upon a Time in the Shadows of War and Winter is a haunting tale of memory, exile, and the fragile bridges between trauma, love, and loss.
Spanning from the ashes of Biafra to the final winters of the Soviet Union, Once Upon a Time in the Shadows of War and Winter is a sweeping novel of uncommon depth—where history is not merely backdrop, but a living force that shapes identity, silence, and longing.
Nkasiobi Ikenna, born on the day his nation surrendered, grows up haunted by a war he never fought and a mother he never met.
Sent to study in the USSR, he searches for meaning in a foreign land unraveling beneath the weight of its own ideology. There, he meets Nadia Mensah—a woman born of two worlds, navigating her own fractured inheritance of abandonment and silence.
Their love becomes a fragile refuge, but also a mirror—revealing the wounds they carry, the memories they cannot escape, and the histories they were never meant to forget.
Lyrical, cinematic, and psychologically piercing, Nnamdi Nwogwugwu’s debut is a meditation on exile, generational trauma, and the fragile bridges between trauma, love, and loss. This is a novel that lingers—like winter wind through broken glass.