What Alexievich did — the process of doing more than 500 interviews with various people related to the disaster, over a 10-year period to write this book — is just astonishing. She received the Nobel Prize in 2015, and this is a work of journalism like nothing I’ve ever read.

It is overwhelmingly sad. It’s easy to read and watch a lot about the explosion at Chernobyl without really understanding what it was like for those who lived there. 

This book takes you there and makes you look, in a way that other media doesn’t. It starts off in a somewhat disorienting way, with no scene-setting or editorializing from the author. It takes a while to get the format – like a documentary with no narrator. But it slowly comes together and the book finds its themes: the fear of radiation, but also fear of abandoning your life and community and being relocated, the ignorance of not only the locals but the soldiers and workers brought into prevent the worst, and most of all, the lies and failures of the government. 

This is horrifying stuff. A few times I was tempted to take a longer break from it, but I’m glad I didn’t. It’s a case study in institutional failure on so many levels.

Highest possible recommendation.