By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine

Historian Leavitt tracks the experiences of seven Ukrainian families in her harrowing debut account of the war’s first year. They include Maria, a 20-something mother whose soldier husband Leonid was taken prisoner by the Russians; Tania and Viktor, pig farmers whose village was occupied by Russian troops who looted houses and menaced Ukrainian loyalists; and Yulia and her husband Oleg, who fled the Donbas region for Kramatorsk, where Yulia lost a leg to a Russian missile attack on a train station. (Interspersed throughout are episodes from the Gogol-esque narrative of documentary filmmaker Volodymyr and his effort in 1989 to exhume and repatriate the body of Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus from a Russian gulag.) These are intimate, human-scale stories of anguished survival: people live in cellars for weeks while bombs shake the earth; scrabble for water, firewood, and cell-phone reception after the grid collapses; seethe with anger at neighbors now collaborating with Russian occupiers; tensely calculate whether the danger is serious enough to abandon their homes; and weep for dead loved ones. Leavitt’s evocative prose conveys these heartbreaking scenes in unsparing detail. (“Then came a powerful explosion, like the sound of a whip multiplied by a hundred thousand.... Yulia pushed herself to a sitting position.... On the ground next to her were her broken bones.”) It’s a searing rendition of Ukrainians’ suffering. (May)