Usually I rate books on how much I enjoy or admire them, but I don’t think that would be appropriate in this case. Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, 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. At which point, 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. Alexievich interviewed more than 500 eyewitnesses, including firefighters, liquidators (members of the cleanup team), politicians, physicians, physicists, and ordinary citizens over a period of 10 years.

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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. Not once do you forget that these are real people who experienced a physical and psychological upheaval unlike anything most of us can imagine.At the time of the disaster (April 1986), Alexievich was a journalist living in Minsk, the capital of what was then the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. 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.

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. Note: this book is also published under the title Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. It offers us a 360 degree view into the human dimension of a large-scale tragedy, not just in the immediate aftermath but in the unconscionable handling of the disaster through deliberate obfuscation and misinformation.The HBO television miniseries Chernobyl often relies on the memories of Pripyat locals, as told by Svetlana Alexievich in her book. But Svetlana Alexievich doesn’t intrude with facts and analysis—she lets Lyudmila Ignatenko give the full, uninterrupted account of her husband’s slow and painful death from radiation poisoning. The men were oblivious to their lack of protection, which even if it had been available would not have saved them.

Some of the numbers are just too shocking to get your head around, but the whole time I was reading this book I had one thought: how did I not know it was this bad? 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. So she stays by his side, and she helps him through the fortnight it takes him to die, as his skin starts peeling off and all his colleagues die one by one.

Alexievich’s Nobel win was unexpected because her books are non-fiction, a kind of oral history (although as this New Republic article points out, she takes considerable liberties with the testimonies she collects). 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. People muse about mortality and time, quote Tolstoy and Andreyev, wonder about remembering and forgetting, and much more.