How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: One Woman’s Fight for Ukraine

Publishing on the third anniversary of the war in Ukraine: The gripping, heartrending story, told in her own words, of a formidable 29-year-old woman serving as a commander on the front lines of the War in Ukraine -- and an intimate, hair-raising look at modern warfare . . .

Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko, a commander in the Ukrainian army serving on the front line of battle, embodies her country’s resistance to the Russian invasion. When her father self-immolated on Maidan Square in central Kyiv in an act of protest, she held a press conference to explain to journalists that he acted ＂in sound mind.＂ Later, in battle on the front line, she would learn via radio-phone that her husband had been killed nearby.

In 2023, veteran war correspondent Lara Marlowe met Mykytenko while covering the war, and found her to be ＂one of the most extraordinary people I have interviewed in 42 years of journalism.＂ From their months of conversations, Marlowe stitched together Mykytenko’s accounts into a riveting revelation of what modern warfare is really like.

Told entirely in Mykytenko’s first person voice, it is a story of cluster bombs and ballistic missiles. Mykytenko has most recently commanded a drone unit, and the scenes of launching drone attacks, and of being attacked by drones, are electrifying and harrowing. At the same time there are vestiges of WWII: trench warfare, no-man’s lands seeded with mines, even chemical weapons.

The result is an urgent story of a besieged nation, a vivid look at the changing face of warfare, and the stirring tale of an inspirational woman fighting for her country’s survival.

Lara Marlowe was born in California and studied French at UCLA and the Sorbonne, then International Relations at Oxford. She started her career as an associate producer with CBS’s 60 Minutes programme, then shifted to print media with the Financial Times and TIME Magazine. She has reported for a host of broadcast and print media, and was a staff foreign correspondent, based in Paris and Washington, for the Irish Times from 1996 until 2023. Marlowe is a leading journalist on the Middle East as well as domestic French politics. For her contribution to Franco-Irish relations she was made Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 2006. Marlowe is the author of Love in a Time of War (2021), The Things I’ve Seen (2010) and Painted with Words (2011).

Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko was born on 18 July 1955 in Kyiv. She was in the ’Female Squad’ of the 16th regiment of the Self-Defence Force during the Euromaidan protests and now serves as the lieutenant of a frontline drone unit in Donbas. In October 2022, she was awarded the Order for Courage by decree of the President of Ukraine.

Both author and subject are available to promote--Marlowe from Dublin and Paris, Mykytenko from Ukraine. Mykytenko may need an interpreter for in-depth discussion but she enjoys speaking English and will be fine on top-line radio chats or written correspondence.