The 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

About the author

SIMON SHUSTER is a senior correspondent for Time magazine 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 Time magazine there in 2013. He returned to the U.S. in February 2020 to work on the nation desk.