WINNER, THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING
SHORT LIST, THE 2025 MOORE PRIZE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS WRITING
WITH A FOREWORD BY MARGARET ATWOOD
A NATIONAL BESTSELLERNPR BOOKS WE LOVE, 2025
"Remarkable...powerful, eloquently testifying to the horrific consequences of this conflict." -New York Times Book Review

"Unsparing and impossible-to-forget... its shape and urgency dictated by war and by its author's shining life so abruptly shredded into night." -The Telegraph

"An effortlessly compelling voice, simultaneously intimate and universal." -Financial Times

NOW A USA TODAY BESTSELLER
WITH A FOREWORD BY MARGARET ATWOOD

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the country's literary scene, and parenting her son. Now she became someone new: a war crimes researcher and the chronicler of extraordinary women like herself who joined the resistance. These heroines include Evgenia, a prominent lawyer turned soldier, Oleksandra, who documented tens of thousands of war crimes and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and Yulia, a librarian who helped uncover the abduction and murder of a children's book author.

Everyone in Ukraine knew that Amelina was documenting the war. She photographed the ruins of schools and cultural centers; she recorded the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses to atrocities. And she slowly turned back into a storyteller, writing what would become this book.

On the evening of June 27th, 2023, Amelina and three international writers stopped for dinner in the embattled Donetsk region. When a Russian cruise missile hit the restaurant, Amelina suffered grievous head injuries, and lost consciousness. She died on July 1st. She was thirty-seven. She left behind an incredible account of the ravages of war and the cost of resistance. Honest, intimate, and wry, this book will be celebrated as a classic.