Chernobyl Prayer

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, Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich closely examines the human realities of the Chernobyl disaster and the half-century we have lived in its shadow.