Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War (Scotland Street Press 2024)
“This is the account we’ve been starved of: an insight into Ukraine from an authoritative British writer who has skin in the country’s game. ‘Odesa is my discovered heart,’ confesses Julian Evans, who fell in love with a woman from this constantly beguiling Black Sea port and started a family there, ‘the place that’s given me what I need for more than twenty-five years.’ An outsider turned insider, his deep personal involvement compelled him to the front line of an unprovoked war without precedent in Europe for nearly eighty years. His vivid first-hand reportage shows how Odesa’s story is inseparable from Ukraine’s – and more than that, how it has become our story too’
Nicholas Shakespeare
“Julian Evans’ deeply felt memoir of an Englishman’s experiences in Ukraine over half a lifetime, wry, unsparing and lyrical, is scattered with bright evocations of a country striving, against the odds, to be”
James Meek
“This is an important book, not just an eyewitness account of a country besieged, but a chronicle of the war, with helpful background both literary and political. Its great achievement is presenting its human face – resolute and heroic”
Paul Theroux
“Julian Evans’ love letter to Odesa is as beguiling as the city itself. In lyrical prose he interweaves history and literature with an account of his three-decades long relationship with the city, mounting a passionate defence of Ukraine as it faces down Russia’s imperial aggression”
Lindsey Hilsum
“Undefeatable is an absolutely fascinating and absorbing memoir of one writer’s relationship with a city and its people. Powerful, cogent, humane and scarifying – Julian Evans has written a modern classic”
William Boyd
“a brilliant portrait of a country and a city now under Russian attack… Evans is a wonderful writer and observer, a stylist as elegant and free-wheeling as the late Jonathan Raban. Each paragraph has a lapidary charm”
Luke Harding, Observer
“a lovely book… it’s dark sometimes, quiet, fascinating, it begins with him turning up in Odesa in the middle of a blackout, and it’s just shot through with personal connections, bringing alive the people and the landscape”
Rory Stewart, “Books of the Year”, The Rest is Politics
“Evans’s book skilfully splices together the personal and the political”
Peter Pomerantsev, Spectator
“Julian Evans’ Undefeatable has a lust for life on its side from the very first page… a memoir brimming with emotion and good humour… he is someone who is always looking for the story even if that pushes him in directions that are uncomfortable and inconvenient for him”
Viv Groskop, Financial Times
Semi-Invisible Man: the Life of Norman Lewis (Jonathan Cape 2008)
“It is not easy producing the biography of a man who spent most of his life writing so well about his own adventures. Yet Evans has succeeded… he has produced not only a hugely enjoyable and engaging portrait but also an affectionate one”
Philip Marsden, The Sunday Times
Jan Morris, Financial Times
“Evans has cleaved to the methods of the master, foregrounding his very strong copy and melting into the scenery himself. He has also carried off a feat of legerdemain which Lewis might grudgingly admire by pulling out all sorts of plums about the old boy without the reader so much as suspecting him of muckraking… Lewis’s admirers can be grateful that his reputation has been entrusted to such a nuanced sleuth”
Stephen Smith, Observer
“an excellent literary biography about one of the truly outstanding writers of our time – a man described frequently as a travel writer but who defies categorisation…. Semi-
Patrick Marnham, Daily Mail
“Semi-Invisible Man is a magnificent book, not only for its meticulous, spirited and colourful depiction of Lewis and his work (it could hardly fail to be vibrant, given Lewis’s lust for excitement), but also for Evans’s stimulating and highly welcome meditations throughout on the nature of biography, the need for stories and, ultimately, on our relationship with truth itself… a triumph in almost every regard”
Jason Webster, New Statesman
“In Julian Evans’s depiction of the Havana scene in Semi-Invisible Man [when Lewis meets Hemingway], we begin to understand the force of Hemingway’s decline and its effect on Lewis’s own persona… This is precisely what is achieved by the most effective biographies, where material is first found, then edited, and ultimately transmogrified, at once properly fastened to its several contexts and brought to life by the synthesising intelligence of the biographer… What he is able to provide is not merely a well-behaved run-through of the life and the reviews, but an improvisation on the very idea of being Norman Lewis: he finds him and he loses him, he accuses him and excuses him, all the while providing a fully illustrated argument about what could have made Lewis into this first-rate writer of prose”
Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books
“Semi-Invisible Man is generous, thoroughly researched, full of valuable insights… this often moving account tells us what Lewis didn’t”
Jeremy Treglown, Times Literary Supplement
“Julian Evans does his extraordinary story justice in this exhaustive and sensitive biography”
Bruce Palling, Literary Review
“Julian Evans offers a matchless biography of a writer he knew well and admired… Semi-Invisible Man combines pages of superbly researched documentary with lively reflections on the Sage of Enfield’s often eccentric dislikes – among them, cats… overwhelmingly, an exemplary life-story”
Ian Thomson, Sunday Telegraph
“a wonderful book – almost as intelligent, stimulating and gripping as its subject”
Sara Wheeler, Guardian
Listen to Julian talking about Norman Lewis’s work and life with Rosie Goldsmith on the Slightly Foxed podcast 57, “Travels with Norman Lewis”
Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific (Eland Books 2014)
“Far and away the best book about the Pacific of our times. Julian Evans is the Robert Louis Stevenson of the post-nuclear Pacific”
Norman Lewis
“This remarkable travel book… Evans’ close attention to human detail brings out the complexity of modern Pacific life and offers occasional glimpses of the paradise it might have been”
Adam Nicolson, The Sunday Times
“This gem of a book… Evans describes memorably an assortment of villains and comedians for whom only the South Pacific can provide a home. His prose is magical, his wit gentle, his stories eminently repeatable, his touch sure and graceful”
Simon Winchester. Guardian
“Julian Evans is a meticulous, vivid writer… honest and shrewd: a first-rate reporter”
Michael Thompson-Noel, Financial Times
Bruce Palling, Tatler
“Evans’s writing [is] jaundiced but sharp, quick to tick off the mess that’s been made of things but still attentive to those too-few moments when the old dream of islands asserts itself… Transit of Venus presents a vivid inventory of corruption and loss”
Times Literary Supplement
“I was immensely impressed with Transit of Venus. It’s so alive and unusual, not to say well-written, with a gem virtually on every page”
Nicholas Shakespeare
“a fascinating and humorous account of life in these delicate and complex island societies”
New York Times
“The ‘noble savages’ of the islands of the South Pacific now have money and alcohol, military bases, atomic explosions and a good deal of Christianity…Traveling on a slow boat through the islands, Evans documents in sorrowful detail, interspersed with excellent historical background, the loss of innocence”
Publishers Weekly
“Probably the best modern travelogue about the Pacific”
Lonely Planet