The Orphanage (, translit. Internat, lit. Boarding school) is a 2017 Ukrainian novel by Serhiy Zhadan. First published by Meridian Czernowitz in Chernivtsi, it follows a schoolteacher who crosses the front line in the War in Donbas to bring his nephew home from a residential school. An English translation by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler was published by Yale University Press in 2021. The English translation won the EBRD Literature Prize in 2022.
The English translation received positive reviews. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and later included it in its list of the 20 best fiction books of 2021. Writing in Slavic Review, Tanya Zaharchenko described Internat as a "synchronous war novel", arguing that it emerged in close parallel with the ongoing war in Donbas. In Asymptote, Kate Tsurkan argued that the book's apparently apocalyptic atmosphere was grounded in the lived reality of the war in eastern Ukraine.
The novel centres on Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian teacher who travels through a combat zone to retrieve his nephew Sasha. The journey out and back takes him through shelled streets, checkpoints, stranded civilians and shifting lines of control.