‘Eat, Pray, Love’ author Elizabeth Gilbert pulling latest book over ‘enormous’ pushback to Russian setting

The bestselling author of “Eat, Pray, Love” says she’s pulling her latest book from its planned publication following a “massive” backlash about its setting in Russia.

Elizabeth Gilbert had announced the publication of her latest novel, “The Snow Forest,” last week, describing it as a story “set in the middle of Siberia in the middle of the last century” that tells “the story of a group of individuals who made a decision to remove themselves from society to resist the Soviet government and to try to defend nature against industrialization.”

But in a video posted Monday on Twitter, Gilbert said she was “making a course correction.”

“Over the course of this weekend, I have received an enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment and pain about the fact that I would choose to release a book into the world right now — any book, no matter what the subject of it is — that is set in Russia,” Gilbert said.

“I want to say that I have heard these messages, and read these messages, and I respect them,” the author continued, saying she would be “removing the book from its publication schedule.” The novel was poised to be released in February, which would come almost exactly two years after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Earlier this year, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “triggered the most massive violations of human rights we are living today.”

“It is not the time for this book to be published,” Gilbert said in her video announcement.

“I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced, and who are continuing to experience, grievous and extreme harm,” the 53-year-old writer — whose best-selling 2006 memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” become a hit movie starring Julia Roberts — told readers, saying she would instead turn her attention to other book projects that were already in the works.

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