Voices from Chernobyl [Hardcover]

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

A journalist by trade, who now suffers from an immune deficiency developed while researching this book, presents personal accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus after the nuclear reactor accident in 1986, and the fear, anger, and uncertainty that they still live with. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.

Shocking accounts of life in a poisoned world. And what quintessentially human stories these are, as each distinct voice expresses anger, fear, ignorance, stoicism, valor, compassion, and love. Alexievich put her own health at risk to gather these invaluable frontline testimonies, which she has transmuted into a haunting and essential work of literature that one can only hope documents a never-to-be-repeated catastrophe. Booklist(Starred Review)Svetlana AlexievichsVoices from Chernobyl(Dalkey Archive) is a collage of oral testimony that turns into the psycho?biography of a nation not shown on any map: the poisoned territory where live Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians who are forever changed by the catastophe. The book  by this years Nobelist  leaves radiation burns on the brain. Julian Barnes,The Guardian, Best Books of the Year Grim and grotesque, the stories accrete across the pages like the radionuclides lodged in the bodies of those who survived. Nicholas Confessore,The New York Times Book Review Svetlana Alexievich's remarkable book, recording the lives and deaths of her fellow Belarussians, has at last made it into American bookstores. (...) Hers is a peerless collection of testimony. Andrew Meier,The Nation A chorus of fatalism, stoic bravery, and black, black humor is sounded in this haunting oral history . . . The result is an endelible X-ray of the Russian soul. PublilƒÛ