"A reported history of the Russo-Ukrainian war, spotlighting the lives of seven ordinary Ukrainians"--

In February 2022, after years of saving, Vitaly opened a coffee shop in a Kyiv suburb. Three weeks later, a convoy of Russian tanks plowed through town and a bomb leveled his apartment building and café. Across the country, in Starobilsk, eighteen-year-old Anna dropped out of the police academy to pursue a tumultuous relationship with a soldier she met online. Nearby, in Chasiv Yar, a family coped with the aftermath of brutal train station bombing. On the other side of the word, Polina abandoned her career in the California fashion industry and returned home to Ukraine to organize relief efforts. Since 2022, the Russo-Ukrainian War has shaken the global order--and affected countless individual lives. How do you keep living when your home is destroyed, when your family is separated, when your body is wounded, or when the enemy lives a few doors down? Can you believe in the future while destruction rages on? In by the Second Spring, the historian Danielle Leavitt draws on her deep connection with Ukraine and a unique trove of online diaries to go beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood and reveal the human experience of the conflict. As battle lines shift, her subjects' relationships, livelihoods, and loyalties are put to new and dramatic tests. Writing with intimacy and compassion, Leavitt gives us a history of lives interrupted, rearranged, and sometimes shattered by war.