Looking at Women Looking at War

September 1, 2024

Amelina, an award-winning Ukrainian author, poet, and activist, was killed by a Russian missile in 2023. This posthumous book, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood, is an account of her documentation of the war, including the photographs she took and the interviews she recorded of survivors, soldiers, and fellow activists. With a 75K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from December 2, 2024
In this devastating posthumous memoir, Ukrainian novelist Amelina (1986–2023) provides a hair-raising account of the war in Ukraine. When Russia attacked Kyiv in 2022, Amelina transformed overnight from “a novelist and mother into a war crimes researcher.” Moved to document the horrors around her, Amelina photographed “shell holes in library walls and the ruins of schools and cultural centers,” and recorded survivor and eyewitness testimony. Discussing how she used that evidence to build war crimes cases against Russian troops, Amelina singles out other women who engaged in acts of resistance, including Zhenia Podobna, a “lawyer turned soldier” who helped liberate towns in east Ukraine, and Yulia Kakulya-Danylyuk, a small-town librarian whose recordkeeping helped Amelina piece together details about the murder of children’s author Volodymyr Vakulenko. 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. Agent: Emma Shercliff, Laxfield Literary.

Starred review from January 15, 2025
Witness to war--and victim of it. Just before taking her son on a vacation to Egypt, novelist-turned-war-reporter Victoria Amelina bought herself a gun. Unlike fellow Ukrainians, Amelina did not plan to join the army. Instead, she would begin working with a mentor from the Truth Hounds, a nonprofit dedicated to researching and documenting the Russian occupation of Ukraine, when she returned from her holiday. On her last day in Egypt, in February 2022, all flights to Ukraine were grounded due to the latest Russian invasion. Amelina and her son managed to get to Poland, where she left him to reenter Ukraine alone. She writes, "I lied to my child, and I will keep lying; war is a source of bad habits." It is also, Amelina proves, a rich source of devastating stories. The author documents everything from a group of Ukrainian writers rescuing a stag beetle on a crowded train platform to an elderly farmer mourning the loss of his beloved animals. Amelina has an impressive eye for detail and an incredible capacity to lyrically capture an image and imbue the smallest moments with humanity. In June 2023, Amelina and other writers were at a restaurant that was struck by a Russian missile; she died a few days later, at age 37, before her manuscript was finished. Fortunately, Amelina's writing has been assembled in this book; her editors have meticulously recorded where they rearranged text, and they also captured unfinished fragments that give readers a rare perspective of wartime Ukraine and insight into the author's brilliant mind. A late Ukrainian writer's gorgeously rendered compilation.

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Starred review from January 1, 2025
Ukrainian novelist Amelina became a war crimes researcher after Russia invaded her country. Intended as a chronicle of the women she met who worked to both repel the enemy and document their crimes, Looking at Women Looking at War became, hauntingly, a posthumous record of Amelina's own work after she was killed in a missile attack on a restaurant in the Donetsk region. Relying on her extensive field interviews, this account ranges from completed chapters to those supplemented by the author's lists, notes, and outlines. Fragmentary by necessity, the narrative is nonetheless an eviscerating account of destruction as Amelina traveled to meet those devastated by the war. In blistering, straightforward prose, she records a litany of outrages following the invasion, while the manner in which the violence upended her life, including separating her from son, adds a relentless sense of urgency leading up to a tragic conclusion. This title, including a foreword by Margaret Atwood, could not be more timely or important as it makes a compelling and convincing argument for why the Ukrainian people must not be abandoned. "The end of the world isn't as quick as everyone imagines," Amelina wrote, "there's time to learn. Yet there are no instructions." Do not let this courageous author be forgotten.

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