The Showman

SIMON SHUSTER is a senior correspondent for Timemagazine based in New York and the magazine's former bureau chief in Berlin, where he was responsible for coverage of the European Union and the former Soviet Union. His family immigrated from Moscow to the United States in 1989 and settled in San Francisco, where Simon grew up. After serving as a writer and editor at the Stanford Daily, his university newspaper, Simon returned to Moscow in 2006 to work as a journalist and joined Timemagazine there in 2013. He returned to the U.S. in February 2020 to work on the nation desk.

'Superb... in coming years, there may be [many] biographies of Zelensky... few, though, will better Shuster's credentials. A fluent Russian speaker, he knew Zelensky's team long before the war, remaining part of the inner circle when the president became the world's most in-demand interviewee. In the invasion's early days, he was among the few journalists allowed through the formidable security of the wartime bunker...The result is a vivid account of life beneath the ground at 11 Bankova Street in Kyiv... an elegant account of the invasion's first year as seen by those in the very eye of the storm'

Daily Telegraph

'A brilliant piece of extended reportage ... Shuster's book does justice to a complex man, who is fighting our fight as well as his own'

The Times

A compelling piece of living history and Shuster, who has reported from Russia and Ukraine for the best part of two decades, skilfully pieces together the transformation of Zelensky... highly readable'

Independent

'An intense, evocative portrait of one of the most remarkable figures of our era. This book offers a front row seat to history as it is being made'

Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Twilight of Democracy

'A narrative tour de force that takes us deep behind the scenes of the Ukrainian president's bunker during the tensest days of Russia's war against Ukraine. Shuster gives an astonishingly intimate portrayal of the former comedian turned wartime leader battling to save his nation - and Europe - that nevertheless maintains a doggedly honest and critical balance'

Catherine Belton, author of Putin's People