Diary of an Invasion

'Uplifting and utterly defiant' Matt Nixson, Daily Express

'Immediate and important ... This is an insider's account of how an ordinary life became extraordinary' Helen Davies, The Times

This journal of the invasion, a collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv, is a remarkable record of a brilliant writer at the forefront of a 21st-century war.

Andrey Kurkov has been a consistent satirical commentator on his adopted country of Ukraine. His most recent work, Grey Bees, is a dark foreshadowing of the devastation in the eastern part of Ukraine in which only two villagers remain in a village bombed to smithereens. The author has lived in Kyiv and in the remote countryside of Ukraine throughout the Russian invasion. He has also been able to fly to European capitals where he has been working to raise money for charities and to address crowded halls. Kurkov has been asked to write for every English newspaper, as also to be interviewed all over Europe. He has become an important voice for his people.

Kurkov sees every video and every posted message, and he spends the sleepless nights of continuous bombardment of his city delivering the truth about this invasion to the world.

'Ukraine's greatest living novelist' -- Charlie Connelly, New European Books of the Year
'No one with the slightest interest in this war, or the nation on which it is being waged, should fail to read Andrey Kurkov' -- Dominic Lawson, Daily Mail
'A vivid, moving and sometimes funny account of the reality of life during Russia's invasion' -- Marc Bennetts, The Times
'The author's on-the-ground account is packed with surprising details about the human effects of the Russian assault ... His voice is genial but also impassioned, never more so than when deploring Putin's efforts to erase Ukrainian culture and history. Ukraine, he says, "will either be free, independent and European, or it will not exist at all". That's why the war has to be fought, with no concession of territory. And he remains quietly hopeful that it will be won' -- Blake Morrison, Guardian
'It is little wonder [...] Kurkov, known for his keen eye for the absurdities of life, would pack his diary of the war with fascinating and eccentric details ... yet what makes Kurkov's diary memorable is its departures into the more quotidian gossip-filled trips to the sauna, Ukraine's morale-boosting victory in the Eurovision Song Contest, ruminations on the status of Ukrainian literature amid paper shortages, and ploys to protect animals in the country's shuttered zoos' -- Megan Gibson, New Statesman
'Uplifting and utterly defiant' -- Matt Nixson, Daily Express
'Immediate and important ... This is an insider's account of how an ordinary life became extraordinary' -- Helen Davies, Times

Born near Leningrad in 1961, Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist. He was a pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than 75,000 copies of his books in a single year. His novel Death and the Penguin, his first in English translation, became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. He is also known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media. His work of reportage, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, was published in 2014.

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