Tomorrow marks three years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since 24th February 2022, I’ve read more books about that country than I ever have previously.
Ironic I know, but perhaps also one tiny positive. For while we typically follow the headline events of a conflict through the stories presented to us in the news, it is often through books that we reach a deeper understanding of the lives of the ordinary people forced to live through it.
So it is with these three books which, from their differing perspectives all brought alive for me the courage, culture and character of a proud nation, fighting for its future.
Read them in solidarity, and as buffers of resistance in dark times.
THE ROOSTER HOUSE by Victoria Belim
They say the Rooster House is the tallest building in Ukraine: even from its basement, you can see all the way to Siberia.
Born in Kyiv to a Russian father and Ukrainian mother, writer and translator Victoria Belim grew up watching her great-grandmother Asya avoid walking past the gates of The Rooster House, the former KGB headquarters in Poltova in central Ukraine. At the age of 15, Belim moved to Chicago, and then as an adult to Brussels where she now lives. She had rarely revisited her homeland, but then after the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, she found herself yearning to return, and to reconnect with her formidable grandmother, Valentina.
And then she unearthed a family mystery, that of her great-great uncle Nikodim who, family records stated, “vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine”. Her quest to discover the truth about what happened to him took her deep into the history of her family, the turbulent past – and present – of her country, and through the gates of the feared Rooster House.
This enthralling, richly-layered story, told across four generations is dedicated to the memory of Belim’s grandmother Valentina. For it is this formidable woman, among many remarkable women in the book, who most comes to symbolise the resilience of the Ukrainian people, with her doughty insistence on planting tomatoes and nurturing her cherry orchard despite everything. “The Rooster House” powerfully illuminates the context of the current conflict, but goes beyond Ukraine in reflecting on identity and culture and language, on the complexities of who we are, and where we’re really from.
LOOKING AT WOMEN, LOOKING AT WAR by Victoria Amelina & Daisy Gibbons (translator)
I see this book as a kind of detective story. Since the war began in 2014 and with the full-scale invasion now, I…have been in search of one thing: justice.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, award-winning novelist, essayist and poet Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in her country’s literary scene, speaking at literary festivals, and parenting her son. The invasion transformed her into someone new: a war crimes reporter and chronicler of the actions of heroic women like herself, determined to resist.; determined to look at war. They include Evhenia, 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.
And then in June 2023, while visiting the embattled Donetsk region with a delegation of writers from Colombia, a Russian cruise missile struck the restaurant where they were dining. Amelina suffered grievous head injuries and died a few days later. She was 37. Posthumously published, this most courageous of books combines her substantial but unfinished manuscript with unedited notes and fragments. Illustrated with photos by award-winning Ukrainian journalist, Julia Kochetova, it also has a powerful introduction by Margaret Atwood which concludes: “This is her voice: fresh, alive, vivid, speaking to us now”.
STRONG ROOTS by Olia Hercules (out June 2025)
If the roots are strong, it doesn’t matter if a storm breaks the fragile stem. It will all grow back again.
I’ve been privileged to read an early copy of this marvel of a memoir by Olia Hercules, best-known to date as a chef and food writer. Born in the south of Ukraine, and now living in the UK, Hercules compellingly charts a century of the history of her native land, through four generations of her family. From her grandmother Lyusya’s deportation to snowy wastelands under Stalin, to her parents’ flight from Ukraine in 2022, it’s a moving ode to the land, to ideas of home and belonging, to family legend, and to recipes passed down the generations.
Hercules’s prose is so lush and evocative you can almost taste the sour cherries; the borsch; the kefir dough stuffed with dill and egg; as she shares a family history which - in common with that of many other Ukrainians - is one of struggle and survival through decades of war, invasion and exile. Written in the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion, Hercules thinks her book is partly “a complicated grief response”. But it also a spirited assertion of national pride and identity, and a celebration of the taste of home.