'This is the account we've been starved of: an insight into Ukraine from an authoritative British writer who has skin in the country’s game. ‘Odesa is my discovered heart,’ confesses Julian Evans, who fell in love with a woman from this constantly beguiling Black Sea port and started a family there, ‘the place that's given me what I need for more than twenty-five years.’ An outsider turned insider, his deep personal involvement compelled him to the front line of an unprovoked war without precedent in Europe for nearly eighty years. His vivid, first-hand reportage shows how Odesa’s story is inseparable from Ukraine’s – and more than that, how it has become our story too.'   Nicholas Shakespeare

Evans is a wonderful writer and observer, a stylist as elegant and gloriously free-wheeling as the late Jonathan Raban. Each paragraph has a lapidary charm. There is plenty of history too, effortlessly told.

Evans' Odesa is a city both fragile and resilient, and has allure in every crack and corner...In his reflections, you sense the emotional toll of personal relationships as well as the increasingly toxic dynamic between Ukraine and Russia - and, equally striking, the fraught relationship Russians have with their own state.

Evans' book carefully splices together the personal and the political, and some of his most fascinating characters are still wrestling with the borders of their identities.

‘Julian Evan’s Undefeatable has a lust for life on its side from the very first page. This is a memoir brimming with emotion and good humour, even as Evans arrives back in Odesa...under bombardment.’ 

- Viv Groskop, The Financial Times 

Julian Evans grew up on Australia's east coast and then in the south London suburbs of the 1960s. In 1990 he left his job in London to island-hop across the Pacific Ocean by ship, small plane and boat, a journey that ended five months later at the US nuclear-missile test range on Kwajalein atoll. His latest book was the highly acclaimed, Semi-Invisible Man: the Life of Norman Lewis. As a journalist, he has been reporting on Ukraine for over twenty years.