Showman
AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
A Telegraph Best Book of the Year
'An intense, evocative portrait of one of the most remarkable figures of our era' ANNE APPLEBAUM
'This is the Zelensky book we’ve been waiting for’ CATHERINE BELTON
THE TIMES: A BEST BOOK OF 2024 – NEXT YEAR’S TOP READS
GUARDIAN: BOOKS TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024
INDEPENDENT: A BOOK OF THE MONTH
Written with unprecedented access, this is the first inside, intimate account of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the perspective of President Zelensky and his team.
Based on four years of reporting; extensive travels with President Zelensky to the front; and dozens of interviews with him, his wife, his friends and enemies, his advisers, ministers and military commanders, The Showman tells an intimate and eye-opening story of the President’s evolution from a slapstick actor to a symbol of resilience, revealing how he managed to rally the world’s democracies behind his cause.
Clear-eyed about the President’s early failures as a peacemaker and his willingness to silence political dissent, the book offers a complex picture of a man struggling to break what he sees as a historical cycle of oppression that began generations before he was born. Even as the war drags on, Zelensky lays out his vision for its future course and, through his actions, demonstrates his strategy for countering the Russians and keeping the West on his side. The result is a riveting, up-close picture of the invasion as experienced by its number one target and improbable hero.
The Showman, as a work of eyewitness journalism, provides an essential perspective on the war defining our age. As a study in leadership and human resolve, its appeal is timeless and universal.
'Intimate but unflinchingly objective, this biography gives you a seat at Zelensky's war cabinet and penetrates his mind as he battles to save Ukraine's freedom—and ours' Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible
SIMON SHUSTER has reported from Russia and Ukraine for seventeen years, most of that time as a staff writer for Time magazine. His coverage of the war began in 2014, when he arrived in Crimea as Russian troops took over the peninsula. In 2019, he met and interviewed Volodymyr Zelensky for a profile of his presidential campaign, then continued covering his administration in the years that followed – first traveling to the war zone with the president in April 2021, as the Russians gathered their armies at the border. When the full-scale invasion began the following year, Simon spent months embedded with the president’s team, securing unparalleled access to their compound in Kyiv, where he wrote The Showman, his first book.