Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary
By (Author) Victoria Amelina
Thorndike Press
Thorndike Press
1st August 2025
Large Print Edition
United States
Non Fiction
Military history
European history
Hardback
"Remarkable...powerful, eloquently testifying to the horrific consequences of this conflict." New York Times Book Review
"Unsparing and impossible-to-forget... its shape and urgency dictated by war and by its authors shining life so abruptly shredded into night." The Telegraph
"An effortlessly compelling voice, simultaneously intimate and universal." Financial Times
NOW A USA TODAY BESTSELLER
WITH A FOREWORD BY MARGARET ATWOOD
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the countrys literary scene, and parenting her son. Now she became someone new: a war crimes researcher and the chronicler of extraordinary women like herself who joined the resistance. These heroines include Evgenia, a prominent lawyer turned soldier, Oleksandra, who documented tens of thousands of war crimes and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and Yulia, a librarian who helped uncover the abduction and murder of a childrens book author.
Everyone in Ukraine knew that Amelina was documenting the war. She photographed the ruins of schools and cultural centers; she recorded the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses to atrocities. And she slowly turned back into a storyteller, writing what would become this book.
On the evening of June 27th, 2023, Amelina and three international writers stopped for dinner in the embattled Donetsk region. When a Russian cruise missile hit the restaurant, Amelina suffered grievous head injuries, and lost consciousness. She died on July 1st. She was thirty-seven. She left behind an incredible account of the ravages of war and the cost of resistance. Honest, intimate, and wry, this book will be celebrated as a classic.