Please Live : The Chechen Wars, My Mother and Me

A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'Powerful . . . a coming-of-age story with a twist' Guardian'Heart-wrenching . . . We need accounts like this haunting, compelling book' Telegraph'A profound and moving tribute . . . It is Lana's inside perspective on what it was like to grow up within this society that makes this such a unique and powerful book' Sunday Times'Wonderfully brave, beautifully written and utterly authentic' TLS'Haunting' Radio Times'Please live' were the last words fifteen-year-old Lana said to her mother. Shortly afterwards Natalia Estemirova was kidnapped outside their apartment block in Grozny, Chechnya.On 15th July 2009, she was murdered for telling the truth.A mountainous sliver of land which creates a natural boundary between Europe and Asia, for centuries Chechnya had been a sharp bone in Russia's throat.Three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, frustrated by the continued presence of the independence movement within Chechnya, Russia invaded. It was a war of extraordinary brutality. It turned Lana's mother, Natalia Estemirova, from a teacher into a human rights investigator.She became a dedicated member of Memorial, intent on exposing the kidnappings, bombings, torture and murders committed by Russian forces and Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed Chechen President.Natalia Estemirova's life, assassination, and the impunity that followed it, tell the story of Putin's Russia.This is Lana's story of growing up in a war. Of the intense bond between a mother and daughter, desperate to be together even though it was so much safer for Lana to live elsewhere, often for months at a time.It is a book both about being brave and about being ordinary in extraordinary times.It's the fulfilment of a promise Lana made at her mother's grave.