Publisher's Synopsis
‘Macabre, surreal, haunting, beautifully observed and darkly moving’ – Rory Stewart
In 1994, Julian Evans discovered the city of Odesa by accident at the end of a ten-day boat journey down the Dnipro river from Kyiv to Crimea. He fell in love with the crumbling, romantic, piecrust-baroque boom town whose port had been a gateway for smugglers, immigrants, divas and poets for 200 years. Returning five years later, he fell in love with one of Odesa’s women, married her in a monastery opposite the railway station, and began a decades-long relationship with both of them.
Profoundly personal, Undefeatable tells the story of Evans’ involvement with the city over nearly thirty years, living in the formerly Jewish and criminal Moldavanka neighbourhood that Isaac Babel made famous in his Odesa Stories, and of his life with his Ukrainian family. But when war comes with Russia’s seizure of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, he discovers that his wife Natasha’s parents have stopped speaking to each other because they are on opposite sides of the conflict.
Tensions between family and friends become a microcosm of the city’s own continuously shifting, sometimes contradictory atmosphere, intensifying with Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. At this point, Evans decides to go back to live in the city under bombardment, and to the front line, ‘because the feeling you’re not where you belong, it bugs you’.
Timely, singular and dramatic, Undefeatable offers a lover’s portrait of a uniquely human, irrepressible city alongside a tour de force of the personal and political, combining empathy with compelling fresh insights into the history of Russia’s war against Ukraine and its cultural and emotional impacts.
