Serhii Plokhy's book added to list of best publications of 2023 compiled by The Telegraph

British newspaper The Telegraph has compiled a list of the 50 best books of 2023. Among them is a new book by Serhii Plokhy, historian and professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University. The English-language edition of Plokhy's book The Russo-Ukrainian War was ranked 33rd.

The Telegraph noted that it had compiled the list of "the most important books to read this year" based on the recommendations of its own book reviewers and authors of specialised guides to the best works of history, fiction and other genres.

The book The Russo-Ukrainian War was presented in Ukraine at the end of August 2023. In the book, Plokhy traces the origins and evolution of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia from the collapse of the Russian Empire to the rise and fall of the USSR and the development of democratic politics in Ukraine, analysing the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion, the unification of the West against the backdrop of this war, and the movement towards Russia's isolation in the modern world. The book was published in English by Allen Lane earlier this summer.

"Perhaps the most definitive account of the history leading up to today's war in Ukraine, from the author of Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy," is how the rating describes Plokhy's book.

The author himself called the book "a way of coping with trauma" and an attempt to analyse how war changes us and changes the world around us. "Another reason why I decided I had to write it is that the war started with many things, but one of them was the mockery of history in speeches and also in Vladimir Putin's article about the unity of Russians and Ukrainians. From the very beginning, there was a very important historical context to which I, as a historian, could respond," Plokhy said earlier. In addition to Serhii Plokhy's book, The Telegraph's top 50 books of the year include Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein, which was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2023, and Israelophobia by Jake Wallis Simons, A Shining by this year's Nobel Prize in Literature winner Jon Fosse, Britney Spears' biography The Woman in Me, which will be published in Ukrainian by Our Format next year, and other books.

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