At one point in her unfinished, posthumously published memoir, the Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina reflects on how she’d take a break from writing. She usually worked in an internal corridor of her Kyiv apartment, the safest place in her home during the war. "Sometimes when an air raid alarm sounds I go to the balcony and watch air defense rockets rise into black sky over the skyline,” she wrote. "I just don’t fear death anymore.”

The book — "Looking at Women Looking at War" — is about bravery but also unforeseen and perhaps unwelcome transformations wrought on individual human beings by the forces of history. It begins with Amelina buying her first gun in the tense days before the Russian assault on Feb. 24, 2022. She stared at the weapon "black and hazardous, on the bed, among all my swimming suits and summer dresses,” which she’d laid out for a vacation.

"I’ve heard that everyone is capable of killing, and those who say they aren’t just haven’t met the right person.” She added, "An armed stranger entering my country might just be the ‘right person.’” Toward the end of the volume, the former organizer of literary festivals weeps for the war dead and those who mourn them. However, she says, "I don’t cry and I don’t even feel sad” when shown an instructional video on how to attach a grenade to a drone.