Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War

By Julian Evans

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.

Reviews of Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War

‘Evans is a wonderful writer and observer, as elegant and gloriously freewheeling as the late Jonathan Raban. Each paragraph has a lapidary charm.’ – The Observer

‘Macabre, surreal, haunting, beautifully observed and darkly moving’ – Rory Stewart

‘This is an important book, not just an eyewitness account of a country besieged, but a chronicle of the war, with helpful background both literary and political. Its great achievement is presenting its human face – resolute and heroic’ – Paul Theroux

‘Julian Evans’ love letter to Odesa is as beguiling as the city itself. In lyrical prose he interweaves history and literature with an account of his three-decades long relationship with the city, mounting a passionate defence of Ukraine as it faces down Russia's imperial aggression’ – Lindsey Hilsum

‘Should be required reading. Undefeatable is simultaneously a work of literary art (it is beautifully written) and a superb introduction to what is happening in Ukraine now’ – Carlo Gébler

‘A beautiful portrait of a city and a nation in a time of peril’ – James Buchan

‘A shimmering Black Sea tapestry’ – Nicholas Shakespeare ‘Undefeatable is an absolutely fascinating and absorbing memoir of one writer’s relationship with a city and its people. Powerful, cogent, humane and scarifying – Julian Evans has written a modern classic’ – William Boyd

‘Wry, unsparing and lyrical; scattered with bright evocations of a country striving, against the odds, to be’ – James Meek