No One Talks About the War: Travels in Ukraine During the War
by Nina Kossman
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"No One Talks About the War" is based on a series of everyday conversations, mainly between the author and people she meets, and occasionally, conversations she overhears. It is written from an extraordinary place at a crucial inflection point—Ukraine in the middle of a protracted fight for its very existence. The author specifically avoided politicians and famous figures, choosing instead to let cab drivers, pensioners, and local workers speak freely. The narrative follows a journey from the relative peace of the western regions to the front lines, where life is measured in days and hours, exploring themes of language, history, and the steadfast commitment of a people facing an uncertain future.
"Nina Kossman’s fascinating travelogue is a choir of voices: kind, angry, contradictory, accusatory, or caring—voices of humanity that cannot be silenced even by death and destruction unleashed by Russia on Ukraine."
—Zinovy Zinik, author, TLS critic, BBC contributor
"Reminiscent at times of Voltaire’s Candide, Nina Kossman’s remarkable new book presents war not as a heroic spectacle but as a lived reality, shaped by misunderstandings, contradictions, and sometimes confusing human encounters. Most striking is the narrator’s unforced sincerity: through a series of poignant vignettes, the book becomes not only a journey through a wartime Ukraine but an unexpectedly revealing meditation on identity, perception, and the difficulty of truly understanding others."
—Maxim Matusevich, author, professor of history
"In 'No One Talks about the War,' Nina Kossman travels across Ukraine, from border towns in the West to the front lines in the East, talking to locals, both civilians and soldiers. The author’s voice, fearless and genuine, elicits illuminating views from the Ukrainians she meets as they confront thorny questions about how to shape their future, survive the present, and what they owe to the past. 'No One Talks about the War' presents readers with portraits of ordinary people trying to live normal lives under the extraordinary circumstances of a brutal war. Unique and riveting."
––Elena Gorokhova, author of “A Train to Moscow”
"As I turned the pages and encountered small snippets of a life centered in a conflict zone, I could not help but feel the gravity of life. There were encounters that made me gasp just the same as there were ones that made me sit in silence and ponder what had just happened. ... Overall, if you are looking for insight into the recent Ukrainian conflict and want to get that insight from someone outside of the mass market media, this will help."
—Matthew Lloyd
Nina Kossman is a multidisciplinary artist. A writer and painter, she exhibited her paintings internationally, and her writing has been published in a dozen languages, including French, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, German, Persian, Chinese, Bengali, and Japanese. Nina Kossman’s 12 books include poetry, short prose, children’s verse, an anthology she edited for Oxford University Press, and two volumes of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry. Her English-language work has appeared in over ninety magazines and anthologies. Her plays have been produced in the US, the UK, and Australia. A finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, grants from the Onassis Foundation and the Foundation for Hellenic Culture, and the (now-defunct) UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award. Born in the former Soviet Union, she lives in New York.
