"In 'Ukraine, War, Love,' Olena Stiazhkina depicts day-to-day developments in and around her beloved hometown during Russia's 2014 invasion and occupation of the Ukrainian city of Donetsk. An award-winning fiction writer, Stiazhkina brings a novelist's sensibilities to bear on an increasingly harrowing series of events, chronicling them with sarcasm, anger, humor, and love. In this personal account, she documents the first bloody chapter of Russia's aggression against Ukraine. Vignettes from her personal life intermingle with current events as Stiazhkina examines ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. She is captured early on by pro-Russian forces while browsing for books, but freed when one of her captors turns out to be a former student. We walk with local dogs and their owners; we meet a formidable apartment building manager who shames occupiers into letting her dismantle and remove their artillery from the roof of her building; we follow a family evacuated to Kyiv whose young son builds checkpoints out of Legos. Stiazhkina documents it all, guiding us with sly humor, dry wit, and dripping sarcasm as we descend with her into grim war. Olena Stiazhkina's Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary is a fierce love letter to her country, her city, and her people"--