Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Arch Tait (Translator), Anna Gunin (Translator), Arch Tait (Translator), Svetlana Alexievich (Author), Anna Gunin (Translator)

New
Paperback
2016
$11.54

'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' - Arundhati Roy, Elle

'One of the most humane and terrifying books I've ever read' - Helen Simpson, Observer
The devastating history of the Chernobyl disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, the winner of the Nobel prize in literature
- A new translation by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait based on the revised text -
In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love. A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget.

Synopsis

'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' - Arundhati Roy, Elle

'One of the most humane and terrifying books I've ever read' - Helen Simpson, Observer

The devastating history of the Chernobyl disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, the winner of the Nobel prize in literature

- A new translation by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait based on the revised text -

In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love. A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget.

$11.54

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
Edition: 1
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 21 Apr 2016
ISBN 10: 0241270537
ISBN 13: 9780241270530
Book Overview: The devastating history of the Chernobyl disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, the winner of the Nobel prize in literature 2015

Media Reviews

A collage of oral testimony that turns into the psycho-biography 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 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 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 *
Alexievich assembles the previously silenced or unsung heroes into a chorus that has the power to move, stun and inspire awe. The result is a remarkable oral history, an essential read -- Malcolm Forbes * Herald Scotland *
Not merely a work of documentation but of excavation, of revealed meaning. It is hard to imagine how anyone in the West will read these cantos of loss and not feel a sense of communion, of a shared humanity -- Andrew Meier * The Nation *
Alexievich serves no ideology, only an ideal: to listen closely enough to the ordinary voices of her time to orchestrate them into extraordinary books -- Philip Gourevitch * New Yorker *
[Alexievich] has become one of my heroes -- Atul Gawande
Awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Svetlana Alexievich is a brilliant choice that recalibrates the status of non-fiction in the literary canon -- Arifa Akbar * Independent *
Through her books and her life itself, Alexievich has gained probably the world's deepest, most eloquent understanding of the post-Soviet condition -- Masha Gessen * New Yorker *
Alexievich retreats into the wings to let her subjects speak. But this is the art that conceals art. Her editor's flair for selection, contrast and emphasis, her almost cinematic touch with cuts, pans and close-ups, make her a documentary virtuoso -- Boyd Tonkin * Spectator *
Her interviews go on for hours. She goes back for more. She transcribes. She discards three-quarters of her material. She polishes. She takes pains to convey the cadence of a person's words. It shows. The distilled work goes deep into the subject. She is after the ephemeral; the emotion behind written history; the history of the soul. Here, she believes, is where the truth lies -- Vanora Bennett * Prospect *
This masterly new translation by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait retains the nerve and pulse of the Russian, conveying the angst and confusion of the narrators -- Serguei Alex. Oushakine * Times Literary Supplement *
The last book that made me cry... incredible -- Joe Dunthorne * Guardian *

Author Bio

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'.