Looking for the 10 best Ukraine-related books of 2025? We’ve got you

The year 2025 brought us more books about and from Ukraine that carry an inescapable heaviness, with war present on almost every page. Lives once shaped entirely by words continue to be cut short on the battlefield or under bombardment. Yet, thanks to the devotion of translators, publishers, and a growing audience of readers who refuse to look away, these voices keep traveling outward. They insist on being heard.

From the first days of the full-scale invasion, one imperative has remained constant: to make Ukraine’s cultural vitality unmistakably visible to the world. The more deeply we engage with that heritage — its astonishing range, its modern experimentation, its centuries of endurance — the more sharply we understand what is at stake should Russia’s campaign of total annihilation succeed — and why ensuring that these stories continue to be heard is itself an act of resistance.

The Kyiv Independent has selected 10 of the best books published in 2025 related to Ukraine. Curious readers should use this list as a guide on the path to discovering even more books from this and previous years, with the anticipation of what is to come in 2026 as well.

Crimean Fig Anthology, edited by Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed, Anastasia Levkova, and Askold Melnyczuk

Looking at Women Looking at War by Victoria Amelina

Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns by Artem Chapeye, translated by Zenia Tompkins

Rock, Paper, Grenade by Artem Chekh, translated by Olena Jennings and Oksana Rosenblum

The City by Valerian Pidmohylnyi, translated by Maxim Tarnawsky

Consider My Inmost Thoughts: Essays, Lectures, and Interviews on Ukrainian Matters at the Turn of the Century by Joseph Zissels

Earth Gods: Writing from Before the War by Taras Prokhasko, translated by Ali Kinsella, Mark Andryczyk, and Uilleam Blacker

Dasein: Defense of Presence by Yaryna Chornohuz, translated by Amelia Glaser

We Were Here by Artur Dron, translated by Yuliya Musakovska