Diary of an Invasion - by Andrey Kurkov

Book Synopsis

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 adopted hometown of Kyiv. This journal is a harrowing record of the months leading up to and after the invasion, as Kurkov migrates to the Ukrainian countryside for shelter. In small villages, surrounded by other refugees, he pens incisive dispatches on the latest border conflicts and bombardments affecting his loved ones. 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 of refugees.

Review Quotes

"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 humane memoir by one of Ukraine's most prominent living authors." --The Sydney Morning Herald

"Kurkov's narrative moves are that of a grandmaster. . .The real story here is with Kurkov's own feelings towards how the war he observes is transforming the people and places he knows so well. 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.'" --Chicago Review of Books

Praise for Grey Bees:

"A latter-day Bulgakov . . . A Ukrainian Murakami." --Guardian

"A post-Soviet Kafka." --Daily Telegraph

"Kurkov draws us with deceptive ease into a dense complex world full of wonderful characters." --Michael Palin

"Strange and mesmerising . . . In spare prose, Ukraine's most famous novelist unsparingly examines the inhuman confusions of our modern times and the longing of the warm-hearted everyman that is Sergeyich for the rationality of the natural world." --Financial Times

"Sergey is at once a war-weary adventurer and a fairy-tale innocent . . . His naive gaze allows Kurkov to get to the heart of a country bewildered by crisis and war, but where kindness can still be found . . . Translated by Boris Dralyuk with sensitivity and ingenuity." --Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

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 novel Grey Bees was published in the United States by Deep Vellum in 2022, where it became a sensation for its honest and personal representation of life in Ukraine. 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.