Voices Within: Life Before and After

From award-winning author Lana Stasek, recipient of a 2026 Readers' Favorite Book Award.

"If you are liked by everyone, ask yourself: have you become too convenient?"

This is the second book in the Voices Within series. Each book stands on its own, but readers may get more from this one by starting with Voices Within: Family Chronicles.

This book is about the moments after which a person cannot return to who they were before. Here, "BEFORE" and "AFTER" are not points on a calendar. They are the line that divides one life into two.

BEFORE: a marriage endured with clenched teeth, in a world where silence often felt safer than honesty. Soviet life taught people to absorb pain and pass it on. Lana does not excuse herself either. At thirteen, during a Chernobyl evacuation camp, she became the ringleader who bullied another child because cruelty had already taught her what strength looked like.

AFTER: immigration to the United States, not as a triumph, but as a difficult exchange. Freedom came with exhaustion, humiliation, and the need to rebuild a life from the ground up. There was kindness too: a stranger at a public library, a quiet gesture at the right moment, the slow realization that safety itself could feel unfamiliar.

The book moves through betrayal, immigration, family, survival, and the consequences of choices made long ago. It tells of people shaped by what happened to them, and by what they chose to do afterward.

Lana Stasek offers no formulas and no pedestal. She writes from experience, including the parts that are difficult to admit.

There is no polished lesson here. Only a life examined without disguise.

Recognition for the English edition of Voices Within: Life Before and After:

Reader Views — 5-star professional review
IndieReader — editorial review

This is the original Russian-language audiobook edition of Voices Within: Life Before and After.