"What the book offers that international reportage can't is surprising detail . [Kurkov's] voice is genial but also impassioned." --Blake Morrison, The Guardian "Kurkov's book seethes with a quiet fury. Yet this is not a war diary in the classic sense. There are no firsthand descriptions of raging battles or soldiers with thousand-yard stares. Instead, in his precise, laconic prose, Kurkov describes the dreadful minutiae of the war and how the conflict has altered the lives of every Ukrainian . Kurkov captures with grim accuracy the destruction of the rhythms of everyday life." --Marc Bennetts, The Times "In Kurkov's account, which begins in December 2021 during the buildup of Russian forces along Ukraine's border and ends in July 2022 as the war grinds on, life in a war zone is both bloody and banal, agonizing and absurd .

Yet what makes Kurkov's diary memorable is its departures into the more quotidian: gossip-filled trips to the sauna, Ukraine's moral-boosting victory in the Eurovision Song Contest, ruminations on the status of Ukrainian literature amid paper shortages, and ploys to protect animals in the country's shuttered zoos." --Megan Gibson, The New Statesman "Probably the first important literary work to emerge from a conflict that appears likely to alter the course of world history, Diary of an Invasion is a thoughtful and human memoir by one of Ukraine's most prominent living authors." --Simon Caterson, Sydney Morning Herald "If anything, Diary of an Invasion is a testament to the supreme weirdness of its time. Its events, like the historical events Kurkov invokes, will morph into something barely recognizable for anyone reading in the future about his descriptions of people drinking whiskey in Kyiv's 'hipster barber shops' or Stalin's imposed Holodomor famine of the 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians. Whatever the future looks like, the themes are likely to feel uncannily familiar. It takes a true strategist who can think several moves out to see beyond the present bloodshed to acknowledge, as Kurkov does, that 'for many people, history has long ceased to be a science and has become part of literature.'" --Joe Stanek, Chicago Review of Books.