Authors Julian Evans and Luke Harding discuss their respective new books, 'Undefeatable' and 'Betrayal'.

Undefeatable

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.

Julian Evans

Julian Evans grew up on Australia’s east coast and in south London. His first book, Transit of Venus, was described as “far and away the best book about the Pacific of our times”. He is also the author of Semi-Invisible Man, an acclaimed biography of the writer and adventurer Norman Lewis. Julian has written and presented radio and TV documentaries including BBC Radio 3’s 20-part series on the rise of the European novel, The Romantic Road, and the BBC Four film José Saramago: a Life of Resistance. He writes for English and French newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, Prospect, Times Literary Supplement and L’Atelier du Roman.He is a recipient of the Académie Française Prize for the Advancement of French Literature. His latest book is Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War, a personal portrait of a city he has known for more than 25 years.

Betrayal

Betrayal charts the dramatic collapse of the post-1945 international system. Ours is now a world in which Trump's America has endorsed Putin's land-grab in Ukraine, painted Europe as an enemy, and toppled and kidnapped Venezuela's president Nicolás Maduro. Meanwhile, an anti-western alliance has taken shape featuring China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Countries find themselves in an uncertain and dangerous era. It is a return to nineteenth century imperialism and spheres of influence - but with withering modern firepower.

Written in thrilling style, this vital and clear-eyed book reports from the frontlines of a new age of conquest. Luke Harding visits villages in eastern Ukraine under Russian bombardment, talks to Greenlanders about a US takeover, tours the divided Korean peninsula and sits down with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Betrayal tells the story of presidents and ordinary people, caught up in conflict and war. Harding offers an essential guide to brutal Great Power politics and how it came back.

Luke Harding

Luke is the Guardian’s senior international correspondent and the author of eight non-fiction titles. In 2011 the Kremlin expelled him from Russia, where he was Moscow bureau chief, in the first case of its kind since the Cold War.

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