How Good It Is I have No Fear of Dying

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents How Good It Is I have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko's Fight for Ukraine, written and read by Lara Marlowe.

The first time Lara Marlowe interviewed Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko in Ukraine in 2023, Marlowe realized that the 28-year-old woman army officer was one of the most extraordinary people she had encountered in 42 years of journalism.

Mykytenko was born in Kyiv in July 1995. She co-founded the ‘female squad’ of the 16th regiment of the Self-Defence Force during the 2013/14 Euromaidan protests, which overthrew the corrupt, pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. She married Illia Serbin, a soldier, in 2015 and joined the army to serve with him in Donbas the following year. Mykytenko briefly left the army after her husband was killed in a Russian bombardment, but re-enlisted on the first day of the full-scale Russian invasion of 24 February 2022. She commands a 25-man drone unit on the frontline in Donbas.

Drawing from a series of interviews with Mykytenko through the winter of 2023/24, Marlowe paints a searing portrait of life on the frontline and offers insights into Ukraine’s past and possible future. How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying is a compelling story of a country at war and a fearless woman fighting for its survival.

Critics Review

This is an account of the Ukrainian soul. If you want to know who we are and why we fight, if you want to understand the heart of this conflict, from the experience of a woman who has seen more than you will ever know, please read this book. It touched me deeply. I recognized the events and familiar places, but most of all, I recognized Yulia Mykytenko. I knew her father and have followed her destiny without thinking that the story of her struggle would be turned into a book - such a powerful book about this strong and wilful female soldier. The roots of Ukrainian defiance are clearly visible in this down-to-earth but moving story.
Andrey Kurkov, winner of the Prix Medicis and the National Book Critics Circle Award, author of Death and the Penguin
What an extraordinary, spectacular book! As long as there are women like Mykytenko in the world, human society will be okay. The combination of courage and love in a single person is an ancient story and one that we must hear over and over again to know that it’s possible. And Marlowe’s prose is so powerful and compelling that I was at a loss as to when to put the book down and do something else for a while. It may well be one of the best and most important books to come out of this brutal war that Russia has inflicted on Ukraine.
Sebastian Junger, New York Times Bestselling author of In My Time of Dying
This book is an extraordinary act of moral courage. It feels like it was created not so much by a writer, and indeed her subject, but by the absolutely necessary spirit of our times. It is a book that is prepared to reach the depths of despair, and yet somehow to cleave open the darkness too. A song about our broken times, it reveals the human strands that hold us together against the odds.
Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin
Lara Marlowe's book has the depth and breadth of a documentary and the subtlety and insight of a novel. If you wish to understand the war in Ukraine, and why and how the Ukrainians are fighting with such valour and tenacity, then read this vivid, moving and affirmative testimony.
John Banville, author and winner of the Booker Prize for The Sea
Unsparing but tender, filled with love and pain, this extraordinary book gives voice to a new generation of Ukrainians whose lives have been interrupted by the Russian war machine that has sought to destroy and subjugate their homeland since 2014.
Yaroslav Trofimov, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for Wall Street Journal and author of Our Enemies Will Vanish
Lara Marlowe has taken us deep into the psyche of Ukrainians who will sacrifice almost anything to resist Russian occupation. We celebrate with Lt Yulia Mykytenko when she triumphs, and weep with her in the face of personal and patriotic tragedy. This is both an intimate portrait of a remarkable individual and an essential chronicle of the war in Ukraine.
Lindsey Hilsum, International Editor at Channel 4 News and author of I Brought the War with Me
This is a quite extraordinary book. It captures the reality of this terrible war through the voice of a remarkable young woman who has chosen to fight for her country. Vivid in its depiction of the human cost of the conflict, intelligent in its explanation of causes and consequences, I recommend this book to anybody who wants to understand what is at stake in this conflict for all of us.
Fergal Keane, BBC Foreign Correspondent and author of The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD
Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko embodies the fighting spirit, defiance, and resilience that have come to define Ukraine and its people... I was particularly moved by descriptions of the many places where I have reported from during my 14 years in Ukraine. This account provides a gritty, on-the-ground perspective to complement the numerous analyses of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Lara Marlowe excels as an interviewer by allowing Lieutenant Mykytenko to share her story in her own words, offering a Ukrainian perspective that is too often overlooked.
Christopher Miller, chief Ukraine correspondent at the Financial Times
A defiant dispatch from the crucible of Ukraine, How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying brings an illuminating vision of an ongoing war, a portrait of bravery and endurance amidst the dirge of battle.
Nico Walker, New York Times bestselling author of Cherry
In Ukraine, war has made of women warriors, of daughters heroes, of widows avengers. The book you are holding is more than a muscular and gripping personal narrative from the front line of the 21st-century’s bloodiest European conflict: it is an irreplaceable chronicle of a modern war in which women command soldiers, fight over the last machine gun at a recruitment centre and pick out wedding dresses during lulls between battles.
Anna Badkhen, author of Bright Unbearable Reality, longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award

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