Literature on Donetsk specifically is sparse in English — the city's significance was underestimated until 2014. But the wider Donbas and eastern Ukraine have generated some important writing.
The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan (2017) — Ukraine's best-known living writer comes from the Donbas and his fiction is saturated with it. The Orphanage is set during the 2014–2015 conflict and follows a man trying to reach his nephew through a warzone that resembles the landscapes of his childhood. Painful, precise, and necessary. Zhadan writes about the industrial east with the authority of someone who grew up there.
Mesopotamia by Serhiy Zhadan (2014) — A looser, earlier novel set in the cities and towns of eastern Ukraine, full of the bars, markets, petty criminals, and ordinary people of a region that was neither Russia nor quite Western Ukraine. Gives a better sense of what pre-war Donbas felt like than any travel account.
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy (2015) — A historian's account of Ukraine from ancient times to the present, indispensable for understanding how Donetsk came to matter in the way it does. Plokhy is scrupulous and readable; his chapters on industrialisation and Soviet history illuminate exactly why the Donbas became what it became.
Chornobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich (1997) — Not about Donetsk, but about the Soviet world that made it. Alexievich's method of assembling voices into collective testimony illuminates the human cost of Soviet industrial ambition — a template for how to understand Donetsk's own history.