Overview

'This is the account we've been starved of: an insight into Ukraine from an authoritative British writer who has skin in the country’s game. ‘Odesa is my discovered heart,’ confesses Julian Evans, who fell in love with a woman from this constantly beguiling Black Sea port and started a family there, ‘the place that's given me what I need for more than twenty-five years.’ An outsider turned insider, his deep personal involvement compelled him to the front line of an unprovoked war without precedent in Europe for nearly eighty years. His vivid, first-hand reportage shows how Odesa’s story is inseparable from Ukraine’s – and more than that, how it has become our story too.'   Nicholas Shakespeare

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9781910895986

Table of Contents

Reviews

'This is the account we've been starved of: an insight into Ukraine from an authoritative British writer who has skin in the country's game. 'Odesa is my discovered heart,' confesses Julian Evans, who fell in love with a woman from this constantly beguiling Black Sea port and started a family there, 'the place that's given me what I need for more than twenty-five years.' An outsider turned insider, his deep personal involvement compelled him to the front line of an unprovoked war without precedent in Europe for nearly eighty years. His vivid, first-hand reportage shows how Odesa's story is inseparable from Ukraine's - and more than that, how it has become our story too.' Nicholas Shakespeare ‘Julian Evans’ love letter to Odesa is as beguiling as the city itself. In lyrical prose he interweaves history and literature with an account of his three-decades long relationship with the city, mounting a passionate defence of Ukraine as it faces down Russia's imperial aggression’ – Lindsey Hilsum  ‘Macabre, surreal, haunting, beautifully observed and darkly moving’ – Rory Stewart  ‘Wry, unsparing and lyrical; scattered with bright evocations of a country striving, against the odds, to be’ – James Meek ‘This is an important book, not just an eyewitness account of a country besieged, but a chronicle of the war, with helpful background both literary and political. Its great achievement is presenting its human face – resolute and heroic’ – Paul Theroux ‘Should be required reading. Undefeatable is simultaneously a work of literary art (it is beautifully written) and a superb introduction to what is happening in Ukraine now’ – Carlo Gébler ‘A beautiful portrait of a city and a nation in a time of peril’ – James Buchan  ‘Undefeatable is an absolutely fascinating and absorbing memoir of one writer's relationship with a city and its people. Powerful, cogent, humane and scarifying – Julian Evans has written a modern classic’ – William Boyd

'This is the account we've been starved of: an insight into Ukraine from an authoritative British writer who has skin in the country’s game. ‘Odesa is my discovered heart,’ confesses Julian Evans, who fell in love with a woman from this constantly beguiling Black Sea port and started a family there, ‘the place that's given me what I need for more than twenty-five years.’ An outsider turned insider, his deep personal involvement compelled him to the front line of an unprovoked war without precedent in Europe for nearly eighty years. His vivid, first-hand reportage shows how Odesa’s story is inseparable from Ukraine’s – and more than that, how it has become our story too.'   Nicholas Shakespeare

Author Information

Julian Evans grew up on Australia's east coast and then in the south London suburbs of the 1960s. In 1990 he left his job in London to island-hop across the Pacific Ocean by ship, small plane and boat, a journey that ended five months later at the US nuclear-missile test range on Kwajalein atoll. His latest book was the highly acclaimed, Semi-Invisible Man: the Life of Norman Lewis. As a journalist, he has been reporting on Ukraine for over twenty years.

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