Absolutely essential and heartbreaking reading. There’s a reason Ms. Alexievich won a Nobel Prize — Craig Mazin, creator of the HBO series Chernobyl

Desperately important and impossible to put down. It is timeless and has sparked so much thought about infinity, sacrifice, love and unspeakable grief. . . what shines clear from the testimonies is love – love which can make you do the most spectacular things — Sheena Patel ― Observer

A beautifully written book, it’s been years since I had to look away from a page because it was just too heart-breaking to go on. Give me beautiful prose and I’ll follow you anywhere — Arundhati Roy ― Elle

A collage of oral testimony that turns into the psycho­biography of a nation not shown on any map… The book leaves radiation burns on the brain — Julian Barnes ― Guardian

Absolutely fantastic — Karl Ove Knausgaard

A searing mix of eloquence and wordlessness… From her interviewees’ monologues she creates history that the reader, at whatever distance from the events, can actually touch — Julian Evans ― Daily Telegraph

One of the most humane and terrifying books I’ve ever read — Helen Simpson ― Observer

Alexievich’s documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so – but it’s a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book… When you consider the extent to which she has been traversing the irradiated landscape, you realise she has put herself on the line in a way very few authors ever do — Nicholas Lezard ― Guardian

A moving piece of polyphony, skilfully assembled from what must have been a huge mass of material… We are living in Alexievich’s ‘age of disasters’. This haunting book offers us at least some ways of thinking about that predicament — Lucy Hughes-Hallett ― New Statesman

This masterly new translation by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait retains the nerve and pulse of the Russian ― TLS

Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk 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, distinctive non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Boys in Zinc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-Hand 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’.