It was once rumoured that the late, great William McIlvanney used to sneak into bookshops and surreptitiously move his Laidlaw trilogy from crime to general fiction. Which kind of makes sense, as Willie’s book’s weren’t really crime genre as we’d understand it. They weren’t really “whodunnit”, but “whydunnit”. We know from page one who committed the crime, and McIlvanney figured that a middle-aged, Nietchze reading cop with a complicated personal life was ideally placed to bring insight into the troubled world around us.

Where in the bookshop do we put Jen Stout’s deeply moving, heart-seizing, darkly beautiful debut work “Night Train to Odesa”? The subtitle is “Covering the Human Cost of Russia’s War”, and, yes, she does that brilliantly. But this is not war correspondence as we’d typically understand it. Stout has clearly kept long, detailed notes from her time in 2022/23 writing dispatches and doing radio pieces from an embattled Ukraine, and the resultant book is a deeply affecting account of ordinary people trying to navigate an impossibly bad situation and resist the Kremlin’s unrelenting fascist aggression. This is the story of people being harmed and dying, not through Russian carelessness but through a deeply cynical offensive, with the civilian body count so high that we can come to no other conclusion than this: it isn’t collateral damage. Making life unliveable is the entire point of the campaign.

The book abounds with paradox, difficult choices and challenges to received wisdom.

LGBTQ+ groups form an alliance with the same hardline, anti-gay football ultras who had previously violently opposed a Pride march. But what choice do you have, when you’re being invaded by a much more terrifying monster from over the border? These are decisions most of us will never have to make. Who are we to judge?

On another occasion, Jen recalls being at an underground music concert. She admits she’d always seen the armed forces as some cold, distant piece of state apparatus and had long associated them with imperialist projects like Iraq or Northern Ireland. But a band member has a brother who has volunteered. She realises that there is no distinction between society and military. They are now one and the same. And while pacifism might have been a noble cause in peacetime it is now impossible. And, everywhere, there’s “solidarity, collective effort and a powerful sense of common purpose”.

There are moments of unspeakable sadness.

Jen meets the family of the poet Volodymyr Vakulenko, who buried his wartime diary in the garden when the Russians came to interrogate him. No matter. They came back and shot him anyway, and threw him in a mass grave. And she gets to know the hugely talented Lviv novelist Victoria Amelina and they talk about travelling together to Scotland and Ireland. “After”, they say, euphemistically. Yet she, also, dies – aged thirty-seven, during a missile strike on a Kramatorsk restaurant.

But Jen also knows that normal life extends to countries at war. The book is also full of alcohol, music, dancing, illicit fags and a surreal moment when young Ukrainians, discovering the Scottish nationality of Jen, start riffing on the lift scene from the comedy show Burnistoun. “El-ee-ven!” they say, giggling helplessly. All life is here.

Paperwork holds up her group at the Poland / Ukraine border, and women supply them borscht and nips of vodka. “It was funny”, she writes. “The combination of petty bureaucracy and human kindness, those two universals. You expect a war zone but find queues of bored truck drivers, the same aggravating delays over a mis-spelt surname, the same ebb and flow of everyday life”.

Life, or a version of it, goes on. And Ukraine, bravely, proudly, doggedly – resists tyranny.

The book is scrupulously fair but there’s no false equivalence. As Jen Stout said recently: “I don’t believe in ultimate, utter neutrality. But, look, it’s the war against fascism. And I know exactly where I stand”.

Alec Ross is in conversation with Jen Stout at Boswell Book Festival, Dumfries House, Ayrshire on Sunday, 12th May at 5pm.

Night Train to Odesa is out now.