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Instead of Dawn
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Oct 26 2026
Pages: 334
Weight: 0.99
Height: 0.70 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
On the morning of February 24, 2022, Masha sends her mother a text.
Mom, is it war?
Yes.
That one word splits Masha's world in two. She left Mariupol long before the war and became a journalist in Russia. Now her parents, her friends, and the city she grew up in are under shelling and siege.
Within a week, her newsroom is raided. Her editor's warning is short: leave the country today, because they will imprison anyone they can reach. Masha and her husband, Max, flee to Turkey with their cat.
On March 2, everyone in Mariupol disappears from the internet. No one knows whether her family is alive.
In Mariupol, Masha's sister Olya hides in basements with her young son, melts snow to drink, and walks to a spring where people are being killed. No signal. No news. No way to ask the only question that matters: Are you alive?
One sister is trapped in hell. The other is safe beside a paradise coast, and cannot say which is harder.
Based on the testimony of a Mariupol survivor, Instead of Dawn is a story about family love, about the helplessness of those who got out, about survivor's guilt, and about life under siege, where ordinary people discover what they are made of. It asks what a person holds on to when catastrophe arrives.
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