Walking Past Tombstones

He is Timothy Morales, an American English teacher, who hid from the Russian military and secret police through the entire eight-month occupation of the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, afraid that his nationality had made him a target. He emerged in public only after the Ukrainian Army liberated the city last week. -New York Times

WALKING PAST TOMBSTONES:
and all the other shit of living under russian occupation

Hi. I lived through 8.5 months of the Russian occupation of Kherson, Ukraine. This book gives you a first-hand behind-the-scenes account of the my daily life as an American living in occupied Kherson.

Walking Past Tombstones details every aspect of my daily life under occupation, from the occasionally profound (being busted by the Russian FSB, HIMARS strikes) through the often mundane (trying to stay under the radar, food scrounging, internet chasing) to the constantly existential (how I kept my sanity).

Walking Past Tombstones is written in a first-person stream-of-consciousness type style. I have an American passport, but I grew up in England, so I have the tendency to filter life through irony. But with the exception of a couple of strategic name changes, everything is true.

My goal in writing this book is not only to give you insight into what it was like living under Russian occupation but also to give you insight into the often-crazy-but-always-lovable Ukrainian mindset. Life under occupation isn’t just about the things that make it onto the the news; it’s also about the endurance of the human spirit, the things that make you want to go on living despite the frequent overwhelming urge to say “sod it” and kick a Russian soldier in the balls.