"Diligently reported and emotionally wrenching." --ANNE APPLEBAUM, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Twilight of Democracy

A behind-the-front-lines account of the lives and loyalties fractured by the war in Ukraine, translated into English for the first time.

First published in Central Europe in 2024, Song of Sirens by the Slovak journalist Tomáš Forró tells the story of Russia's invasion of Ukraine through the lives of the people enduring it. Brutal and evocative, meticulously reported and personally rendered, this work of literary reportage tells the story of the war through the eyes of its actual participants: soldiers, volunteers, and civilians from whom the public rarely hears.

Before the readers' eyes, the real-life individuals in this book turn from soldiers to deserters, volunteers to burglars, civilians to collaborators. Song of Sirens is the story of a people who are trying to survive, as well as a postcommunist country struggling with its identity and corruption amid the threat of its very existence. It is also the personal account of Tomáš Forró, Slovak journalist, humanitarian worker, and (unarmed) part of military operations on the front line.

Forró introduces us to a Ukraine that the world has rarely seen--and that he never imagined would come to pass. Beginning just before the launch of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he blends reporting, personal testimonies, and personal reflection, and showing its heroes and those caught up in it as full-blown human beings with their contradictions and weaknesses. Here, the war serves as a background that reveals troubled human nature and the difficulties of post-Soviet societies trying to break free from their past.