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A War and Justice Diary
by Victoria Amelina
Destined to be a classic, a poet's powerful look at the courage of resistance.
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.
"In this devastating posthumous memoir, Ukrainian novelist Amelina (1986–2023) provides a hair-raising account of the war in Ukraine...The inclusion of Amelina's unedited notes, ranging from her thoughts about the effects of trauma on memory to her reflections on a trip to the captured city of Kherson, give the narrative a heightened immediacy and underline the tragedy of her death in a Russian missile strike. This is not to be missed." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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 information about Looking at Women Looking at War was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Victoria Amelina was killed by a Russian missile in July, 2023. She was an award-winning Ukrainian novelist, essayist, poet, and human rights activist whose prose and poems have been translated into many languages. In 2019/2020 she lived and traveled extensively in the US. She wrote both in Ukrainian and English, and her essays have appeared in Irish Times, Dublin Review of Books, and Eurozine.
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