By Andrey Kurkov
Paperback introduction by Christopher Miller
Dispatches from a nation under siege, from the winner of the NBCC Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize for Grey Bees.
Publication Date: April 4th, 2023
Hardback: 9781646052813
Paperback: 9781646054268
eBook: 9781646052820
Available in paperback: May 26th, 2026
Description
Dispatches from a nation under siege, from the winner of the NBCC Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize for Grey Bees.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, novelist and journalist Andrey Kurkov was forced to flee his hometown of Kyiv. This journal is a harrowing record of the months leading up to and after the invasion, as Kurkov and his family migrate to western Ukraine for shelter. Surrounded by others fleeing violence, he pens incisive dispatches on the latest border conflicts and bombardments, and the shifts and schisms inside Ukrainian social and political life. These wartime entries ruminate on Ukraine’s historic past and possibilities for its future.
An avid political commentator, Kurkov has written for prominent English newspapers, delivered lectures, and been interviewed across Europe on the war in Ukraine. Now with an introduction by Financial Times Ukraine correspondent Christopher Miller and a 2025 afterword from the author reflecting on the years that have elapsed since the war began, Dairy of an Invasion is a deeply affecting glimpse into the day-to-day realities of millions.
Biographical Information
Born near Leningrad in 1961, Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist. He received “hundreds of rejections” and was a pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than 75,000 copies of his books in a single year. His novel Death and the Penguin, his first in English translation, became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. As well as writing fiction for adults and children, he has become known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media. His work of reportage, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, was published in 2014, followed by the novel The Bickford Fuse (MacLehose Press, 2016). He lives in Kyiv with his British wife and their three children.
Christopher Miller is the chief Ukraine correspondent for the Financial Times and author of The War Came To Us: Life And Death In Ukraine, winner of the 2024 Witold Pilecki International Book Award. He has lived in and worked in Ukraine since 2010, reporting on Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution, Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and its invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. He has broken major international news stories, including uncovering Russian war crimes, with his reporting cited as evidence before the International Criminal Court. Miller was previously a world and national security reporter for Politico and a world correspondent for BuzzFeed News. When he’s not in Kyiv or on the front lines in eastern Ukraine, he lives with his wife and two Ukrainian cats in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews
“What the book offers that international reportage can’t is surprising detail . . . [Kurkov’s] voice is genial but also impassioned.” —Blake Morrison, The Guardian
“Kurkov’s book seethes with a quiet fury. Yet this is not a war diary in the classic sense. There are no firsthand descriptions of raging battles or soldiers with thousand-yard stares. Instead, in his precise, laconic prose, Kurkov describes the dreadful minutiae of the war and how the conflict has altered the lives of every Ukrainian . . . Kurkov captures with grim accuracy the destruction of the rhythms of everyday life.” —Marc Bennetts, The Times
“In Kurkov’s account, which begins in December 2021 during the buildup of Russian forces along Ukraine’s border and ends in July 2022 as the war grinds on, life in a war zone is both bloody and banal, agonizing and absurd . . . Yet what makes Kurkov’s diary memorable is its departures into the more quotidian: gossip-filled trips to the sauna, Ukraine’s moral-boosting victory in the Eurovision Song Contest, ruminations on the status of Ukrainian literature amid paper shortages, and ploys to protect animals in the country’s shuttered zoos.” —Megan Gibson, The New Statesman
“Probably the first important literary work to emerge from a conflict that appears likely to alter the course of world history, Diary of an Invasion is a thoughtful and human memoir by one of Ukraine’s most prominent living authors.” —Simon Caterson, Sydney Morning Herald
“If anything, Diary of an Invasion is a testament to the supreme weirdness of its time. Its events, like the historical events Kurkov invokes, will morph into something barely recognizable for anyone reading in the future about his descriptions of people drinking whiskey in Kyiv’s ‘hipster barber shops’ or Stalin’s imposed Holodomor famine of the 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians. Whatever the future looks like, the themes are likely to feel uncannily familiar. It takes a true strategist who can think several moves out to see beyond the present bloodshed to acknowledge, as Kurkov does, that ‘for many people, history has long ceased to be a science and has become part of literature.’” —Joe Stanek, Chicago Review of Books