Description
"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.
Product Details
| Publisher | St. Martin's Press |
| Publish Date | February 18, 2025 |
| Pages | 320 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781250367686 |
| Dimensions | 218.4 X 5.8 X 27.9 mm | 0.8 pounds |
About the Author
Margaret Atwood is best known as the author of more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including The Blind Assassin, which won the Booker Prize. She has written several other children’s books, including Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radish and Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Reviews
"Devastating...not to be missed."
―Publishers Weekly (Starred)
"Amelina’s absence may be felt on every page... It slows you down. It transmits a powerful sense of chaos. It compels attentiveness, as the TV news does not.How to process such things? ...As the months roll on, it’s sometimes hard to feel anything at all. Her colleague Oleksandra Matviichuk tells her that when this happens, she should find a pot of face cream and rub it into her cheeks: its coldness, softness and scent will bring her back to life, she’ll find. And it’s true. After a day of heavy bombardments in Kyiv...Amelina tries it for herself, and it works. Such details doubtless won’t be found in any of the bigger, more complete books that will one day be written about the war in Ukraine, but to me they are of inestimable worth: not fiction but written, nevertheless, with the fine sensibility of a novelist."
—The Guardian
"Sharp, clear and unflinching...Reading this book is not only a literary experience but an act of defiance. Amelina was killed searching for the truth. She wanted the world to look. That's what we must do: keep looking, keep speaking, keep remembering."
—Irish Independent
"Amelina has an impressive eye for detail and an incredible capacity to lyrically capture an image and imbue the smallest moments with humanity....Gorgeously rendered."
—Kirkus (Starred)
"Makes you want to weep, because what the pages of Looking at Women Looking at War instantly make clear is just how much Amelina had to offer...[An] anguished attempt to answer the question: when your country is facing an existential threat, what role can the creative artist play?"
—Financial Times
"Urgent, gut-wrenching and up close and personal."
—Lee Woodruff, Bookmarks
"Incredible...still fragmentary and electric feeling."
—Elif Batuman, "The Elif Life"
"Rare, powerful and affecting, a work of principle and courage by a truly brilliant and inspiring writer."
—Philippe Sands, author of East West Street, Professor of Laws, University College London
"Rarely ever have I read anything this mature about a war that is taking place right now. Reading Amelina's book feels like a lightning illuminating your heart"
—Sofi Oksanen, award winning author of Purge
“This book would always have been important evidence that the Ukraine people were suffering criminal attack. Written by a poet, it is also a work of literature, published after the author lost her life doing her research. It is an icon of a young woman’s heroism.”
—Philippa Gregory
"Through investigation, interviews, and descriptions, Victoria Amelina’s book offers a vivid and harrowing vision of the war in Ukraine. The talent and courage of this young poet and novelist transform this interrupted diary into a vital document for contemporary history."
—Pascal Bruckner
Praise for Victoria Amelina
"Victoria’s moral clarity, determination, and love of country impressed me greatly. She now joins the ranks of those whose lives have been cut short by war, their truncated careers the source of what-if musings forever afterward. In Victoria’s case, I feel certain that her legacy, and her words, will endure, infusing a contemporary, combustive element to the Ukrainians’ growing sense of identity and nationhood."
—Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker
“Victoria Amelina had a way of walking straight into your heart and making herself at home there.”
—Lia Mills, The Dublin Review of Books
"What impressed me was [Amelia's] seeming ability to gaze steadily into the abyss and not fall into despair, perhaps because she possessed a marvelous sense of humor."
—Christopher Merrill, author of Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars
"Amelina touched so many of us with her profound capacity for empathy and observation... For its great courage and significance, her difficult work in this realm brings to my mind the acts of resistance figures like Jan Karski and Witold Pilecki, who similarly took great risks to collect and convey information about Nazi German crimes to the Western Allies during the Second World War.”
—Peter Balakian, author of Black Dog of Fate
"Victoria has completed her worldly task, leaving us the legacy of her example: of grace under pressure, as Hemingway defined courage, and of the abiding importance of her mission."
—Askold Melnyczuk, award-winning author of The Man Who Would Not Bow
"[Victoria] has taught me that being a writer extends well beyond one’s ability to craft words and sentences, that sometimes it involves risking your life to make sure someone else’s story doesn’t go undocumented, speaking out even when it feels like fewer and fewer people are listening."
—Yevheniya Dubrova
"A great and very brave colleague."
—Héctor Abad Faciolince, Colombian novelist, essayist, journalist, and editor
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