By Svetlana Alexievich
Translated by Arch Tait and Anna Gunin
Paperback: 9781628976397
eBook: 9781628975246
Publication Date: May 5th, 2026
Description
From Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature: a devastating human history of the Chernobyl reactor disaster, now in an emotive new translation.
First there is the voice of the firefighter’s wife, who was kept from going to her husband because he was a dangerous radioactive object. Then the voice of an old woman unable to see why she has to leave her farm and her village. And, of course, the “clean-up crew,” the soldiers and scientists for whom everything changed on that fateful day in 1986.
From the tender and intimate stories of people caring for their loved ones as they deteriorate from radiation sickness to the moving stories of the people in the surrounding cities told suddenly to abandon their homes, this definitive translation of Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s masterpiece closely examines the human realities of the Chernobyl disaster and the half-century we have lived in its shadow.
Praise
“Beautifully written . . . heart-breaking.” —Arundhati Roy, Elle
“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
“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 catastrophe.” —Julian Barnes, The Guardian, Best Books of the Year
“A chorus of fatalism, stoic bravery, and black, black humor is sounded in this haunting oral history . . . The result is an indelible X-ray of the Russian soul.” —Publishers Weekly
“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.” —Starred Review, Booklist
Biographical Note
Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own nonfiction genre, which gathers a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
Anna Gunin’s recent translations include Oleg Pavlov’s award-winning Requiem for a Soldier (2015) and MikailEldin’s war memoirs The Sky Wept Fire (2013). Her translations of Pavel Bazhov’s folk tales appear in Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (2012), shortlisted for the 2014 Rossica Prize.
Arch Tait has translated thirty books, short stories, and essays by most of today’s leading Russian writers. His translation of Anna Politkovskaya’s Putin’s Russia (2004) was awarded the inaugural PEN Literature in Translation prize in 2010. Most recently, he has translated Mikhail Gorbachev’s The New Russia (2016).