Alexievich’s documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so – but it’s a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book. People muse about mortality and time, quote Tolstoy and Andreyev, wonder about remembering and forgetting, and much more.

I think it can be safely said that for the majority of Russians, over the greater part of recorded history, to have been born in that country has not been to draw one of the winning tickets in the lottery of life. 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. 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. Chernobyl Prayer is an oral history compiled by Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich from several years of interviews that she conducted among the people who experienced the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant firsthand. On 26 April 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, exploded and released 50m curies of radiation into the atmosphere, 70% of it falling on Belarus, but with plenty to spare for other countries not even vaguely adjacent.The cancers induced by exposure to high levels of radiation brought Valentina, whose intense love for her husband was laid bare, to face day by day the death of her husband and with her own happiness. 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.

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. Chernobyl Children International and the Clean Futures Fund are two of the charities in this effort.It isn't an easy read, but it feels like 'eavesdropping' on a conversation we in the West were never meant to hear. Undoubtedly, he saved lives, but so many lives were lost and the effects are certainly still affecting so many people today.