Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The American translation was awarded the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction. I thought I recognized the image in your header from the abandoned amusement park in Pripyat, so I was immediately interested in the story you were about to tell, but it’s even more interesting to learn that you took the pictures and toured the area yourself. Alexievich assembles the previously silenced or unsung heroes into a chorus that has the power to move, stun and inspire awe. 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'. Alexievich's documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so - but it's a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book.

Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. The author allows the words of those who lived, and many who still live, in the affected areas to tell their own story. If you cannot weep for hers, and the other voices here, then you have lost your connection with what it is to be human.To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. It is a catalogue of trauma – of lives which were disturbed by events so cataclysmic that the effects rippled around the whole planet.

The scale of the devastation and its insidious nature are perhaps beyond the power of the individual mind to imagine, which is one good reason why the polyphonic form Alexievich has made her own (and for which she won the Nobel prize for literature last year) is so appropriate. 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. 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.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. This book gives a voice to the anger, pain, and heartbreak, but it is seldom an easy voice to listen to, because it forces the reader to confront how little they really know about what will one day be remembered among the most significant events of the 20th century. The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach.

But most of the book is made up of accounts from civilians who recount their thoughts and feelings as it seemed like the world was coming to and end around them. Note: this book is also published under the title Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. It becomes clear how many of the deaths were unnecessary, how many lives were sacrificed because people didn’t understand or didn’t care about the need to protect people from the radiation, or because they had become used to covering up bad news and didn’t want to admit the severity of the disaster. I think it can be safely said that for the majority of Russians, over the greater part of recorded history, to have been born in that country has not been to draw one of the winning tickets in the lottery of life. Of illness, death, birth defects, the loss of loved ones, the way the disaster was not dealt with effectively and of the heroism of those who went in, trustingly, to try to stop the unbelievable being even worse. What kept me going was the strength of her love for her husband, and the child she was carrying; the baby seemed to absorb the radiation meant for her as it was born dead.