Chernobyl Prayer

Critics Review

• 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

  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

  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

  Daily Telegraph

• One of the most humane and terrifying books I’ve ever read

  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

  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

  New Statesman

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

  TLS

• 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

  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

  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

  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

  Independent

• Through her books and her life itself, Alexievich has gained probably the world’s deepest, most eloquent understanding of the post-Soviet condition

  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

  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

  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

  Times Literary Supplement

• The last book that made me cry… incredible

  Guardian