Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

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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? 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. In this chapter, Svetlana Alexievich makes it clear that this is not a book about the details of what happened at Chernobyl, why the reactor failed, who was to blame, etc. Not once do you forget that these are real people who experienced a physical and psychological upheaval unlike anything most of us can imagine. Stories like this are, of course, hard to read, but Chernobyl Prayer is not just a compilation of horror.

Chernobyl Prayer, first published in 1997 and then revised in 2013, is part of a project collectively entitled, with some irony, “Voices from Utopia”, which Alexievich has been working on since 1985. There is a depth and intensity to the suffering of those people affected by the Chernobyl disaster which Svetlana Alexievich has succeeded in capturing through her interviews.

The real Chernobyl: HBO's hit miniseries is ending, and here's how its characters compare to their real-life counterparts". We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Undoubtedly, he saved lives, but so many lives were lost and the effects are certainly still affecting so many people today.

Alexievich’s documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so – but it’s a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book. Interviews with teachers, hunters, soldiers, clean-up workers, medics, a cameraman, a physicist and children provide diverse experiences from the days immediately following the disaster to the months and even years later when people were still getting sick. 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 loss whose greatest element was imposed on the children, youngsters who came to experience illnesses and painful death, one worsened by being torn from all they knew by forces beyond their understanding to experience sickness they were not responsible for. One man actually reclaimed his front door – which his family had always laid the bodies of their dead relatives – snatching it in the night and taking it, like a thief, through the woods. She talked with residents of the surrounding villages, soldiers recruited to help with the cleanup efforts, politicians, academics, nuclear scientists, farmers, teachers, widows, and children in hospital wards, and what she accomplishes within this fairly slim volume is quite remarkable. In Chernobyl Prayer each interview is usually a few pages long, and reads as a monologue – which is how they are described in the contents pages.

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.

Chernobyl is often remembered as a Russian incident, but 70% of the radioactivity fell upon Belarus, causing everything from the long-term poisoning of a quarter of the country’s farmland to an 64-fold increase in the rate of cancer.