Null

This is a dark, gripping novel of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from one of Poland’s bestselling writers. Based on Szczepan Twardoch’s own experience delivering aid to Ukrainian soldiers, Null captures the personal and moral dilemmas of soldiers’ lives in a war with no end in sight.

The novel takes place in a series of squalid dugouts a few miles from the front line. The main character, known only by the codename ‘Horse’, is a Polish volunteer into the Ukrainian army, motivated by his anger at the war and a desire to flee his dysfunctional life at home. He and his comrades, a motley crew of volunteers and unwilling draftees, are bound together by their care for one another in a situation of seeming futility.

Their boredom and alienation is punctuated by moments of frenzied chaos, as Russian attacks force them from one position to another. Their lives – and deaths – on the front seem dictated not by a cause or great strategy, but the random chance of an artillery hit from miles away or stumbling across a hostile drone. These adrenaline-pumping sequences drive the narrative forward and are a potent reminder that this war, so often portrayed in the media as a stalemate, is still very much ‘hot’.

Null is an outstanding entry in the canon of war literature. Twardoch tells his story in textured, Ukrainian-inflected prose, using second-person narration, which brings the reader directly into the story. Above all, he probes the many contradictions of a seemingly just war, one in which a moral cause does not always translate into moral means.