While the war in Ukraine continues to grab news headlines, the daily lives of Ukrainians remain opaque and mostly anonymous. What is it really like to live there during wartime? Historian Danielle Leavitt answers that question in her book, By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine. By going beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood, Leavitt reveals the human experience of the conflict.

A U.S. citizen who grew up in Ukraine, Leavitt draws on her deep familiarity with the country and online diaries to track a diverse group of Ukrainians through the first year of the war. Among others, she introduces Vitaly, whose plans to open a coffee bar in a Kyiv suburb fall apart when the Russian army marches through his town and his apartment building is split in two by a rocket; Anna, who drops out of the police academy and begins a tumultuous relationship with a soldier; and Polina, a fashion-industry insider who returns home from Los Angeles to organize relief.

To illuminate the complex resurgence of Ukraine’s national spirit, Leavitt also tells the story of Volodymyr Shovkoshitniy—a nuclear engineer at Chernobyl who went on to lead a daring campaign in the late 1980s to return the bodies of three Ukrainian writers who’d died in a Soviet gulag. Leavitt offers an interior history of Europe’s largest land war in seventy-five years—one that goes beyond the headlines about the conflict.

Danielle Leavitt holds a PhD in history from Harvard University, where she has been a fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute. She grew up in both Ukraine and the United States, and currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. By the Second Spring is her first book.

Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic, Jewish, and International Studies at the University of Washington. He’s the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made (2022), and co-editor and co-translator of In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (2026).

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By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine (Hardcover)

Elliott Bay Book Company