"Evans is a wonderful writer and observer, a stylist as elegant and gloriously free-wheeling as the late Jonathan Raban. Each paragraph has a lapidary charm."

"The book offers a shrewd analysis of Ukraine’s present struggle and what it means. The British media has frequently got it wrong, Evans suggests"

"In Undefeatable, Julian Evans recounts his 30-year relationship with the Ukrainian city – and a local woman – in beautifully evocative style"

Read the Guardian review by Luke Harding here.

"In his reflections, you sense the emotional toll of personal relationships as well as the increasingly toxic dynamic between Ukraine and Russia – and, equally striking, the fraught relationship Russians have with their own state."

"The book is at its most powerful when it weaves together these psychological insights with personal reminiscences."

"Whether this unsparing book records the evolution of a city and its darkest days, or merely the final glimmers of light before something even darker, only time will tell."

Read The Telegraph review by Francis Dearnley here.

Read the Times Literary Supplement Review by Boris Dralyuk here.

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You can watch Julian's interview on Sky News about his book and the ever-changing situation in Ukraine here.

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"This is the account we've been starved of: an insight into Ukraine from an authoritative British writer who has skin in the country’s game. ‘Odesa is my discovered heart,’ confesses Julian Evans, who fell in love with a woman from this constantly beguiling Black Sea port and started a family there, ‘the place that\'s given me what I need for more than twenty-five years.’ An outsider turned insider, his deep personal involvement compelled him to the front line of an unprovoked war without precedent in Europe for nearly eighty years. His vivid, first-hand reportage shows how Odesa’s story is inseparable from Ukraine’s – and more than that, how it has become our story too."

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Nicholas Shakespeare

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"Macabre, surreal, haunting, beautifully observed and darkly moving"

Rory Stewart

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