Description

‘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

Publisher Review

Evans is a wonderful writer and observer, a stylist as elegant and gloriously free-wheeling as the late Jonathan Raban. Each paragraph has a lapidary charm. There is plenty of history too, effortlessly told. — Luke Harding * A ‘sleeping beauty’ soaked in blood * Evans’ Odesa is a city both fragile and resilient, and has allure in every crack and corner…In his reflections, you sense the emotional toll of personal relationships as well as the increasingly toxic dynamic between Ukraine and Russia – and, equally striking, the fraught relationship Russians have with their own state. — Francis Dearnley * A very loving letter to Odesa – once a poet’s haven, now a Russian target. * Evans’ book carefully splices together the personal and the political, and some of his most fascinating characters are still wrestling with the borders of their identities. — Peter Pomerantsev * The battle for Odesa * ‘Julian Evan’s Undefeatable has a lust for life on its side from the very first page. This is a memoir brimming with emotion and good humour, even as Evans arrives back in Odesa…under bombardment.’

– Viv Groskop, The Financial Times — Viv Groskop