Undefeatable
Julian Evans
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From the publisher
From love and marriage to the front line of Russia’s invasion, a profoundly personal story of the city of Odesa and the emotional impacts of Putin’s ten-year war.
‘This is an important book’ – Paul Theroux
‘Macabre, surreal, haunting, beautifully observed and darkly moving’ – Rory Stewart
'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 reflects on over twenty years of reporting on Ukraine, exploring literary history, current war experience and falling in love and marrying a Ukrainian whose parents are on different sides of the conflict.The familial tension is a microcosm of the city’s continuously shifting atmosphere. The whole picture is interspersed with staccato hits of fighting which Julian captures vividly.
In 1994, Julian Evans discovered the city of Odesa by accident at the end of a ten-day boat journey down the Dnipro river from Kyiv to Crimea. He fell in love with the crumbling, romantic, piecrust-baroque boom town whose port had been a gateway for smugglers, immigrants, divas and poets for 200 years. Returning five years later, he fell in love with one of Odesa’s women, married her in a monastery opposite the railway station, and began a decades-long relationship with both of them.
Profoundly personal, Undefeatable tells the story of Evans’ involvement with the city over nearly thirty years, living in the formerly Jewish and criminal Moldavanka neighbourhood that Isaac Babel made famous in his Odesa Stories, and of his life with his Ukrainian family. But when war comes with Russia’s seizure of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, he discovers that his wife Natasha’s parents have stopped speaking to each other because they are on opposite sides of the conflict. Tensions between family and friends become a microcosm of the city’s own continuously shifting, sometimes contradictory atmosphere, intensifying with Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. At this point, Evans decides to go back to live in the city under bombardment, and to the front line, ‘because the feeling you’re not where you belong, it bugs you’.
Timely, singular and dramatic, Undefeatable offers a lover’s portrait of a uniquely human, irrepressible city alongside a tour de force of the personal and political, combining empathy with compelling fresh insights into the history of Russia’s war against Ukraine and its cultural and emotional impacts.