Never Say War

A totally unprecedented, behind the scenes portrait of Putin’s Russia at war. Her intrepid travels and interviews lift the curtain on the lives and thoughts of all sorts of Russians. It is astonishing. A major work * Antony Beevor *
I really loved Never Say War. I found it hypnotically good, in fact. She has imparted a sense of the Russians, in this “at war under Putin’s thumb” era in a way I have not experienced before. Once again, Åsne Seierstad has outdone herself with a book that reveals some of the deep and troubling truths about our time. In her telling, Putin’s Russians emerge as a unique people, bighearted, black-humored and self reliant, but nurtured by a tragic sense of their own history. Governed by a ruler without compassion and in the absence if any rule of law, they are condemned to faceless conformity or else, for those heroically doomed exceptions, recklessly romantic lives of sacrifice and oppression * Jon Lee Anderson, author of To Lose a War *
What kind of man enlists to fight in Ukraine? A Russian soldier who runs from Wagner to seek asylum in Norway tells his heart-wrenching story to Åsne Seierstad. Her book takes readers on a journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow and Siberia tracing Russia’s war with Ukraine. A happy read it is not but a necessary one * Jana Bakunina, author of The Good Russian: In Search of a Nation’s Soul *
An exquisite work of on-the-ground reportage conjuring all the violence, injustice and contradiction of wartime Russia. Seierstad’s steadfast empathy and personal warmth give her a direct line to the motivations of everyone from blood-soaked mercenaries to Putin’s most implacable critics. Novelistic-in-scope, insightful and humane * Howard Amos, author of Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruin of Empire *

Asne Seierstad is an award-winning war correspondent and writer, best known for The Bookseller of Kabul, which has sold over two million copies.

She first visited Russia in 1990, ahead of beginning studies in the Russian language in what was then Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. She reported on the country throughout the 90s and lived between Moscow and Grozny from 2006-7 while researching her book The Angel of Grozny: Life Inside Chechnya.

Between 2023 and 2024, she made five extended trips to Russia that form the basis of her latest book. Her insights are invaluable in understanding the past, present, and future of a behemothian country that concerns us all.

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