NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union
and the emergence of a new Russia from Svetlana Alexievich winner of the Nobel Prize in
Literature NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND PUBLISHERS
WEEKLY LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New
York Times The Washington Post The Boston Globe The Wall Street Journal NPR Financial Times
Kirkus Reviews When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize it cited
her for inventing a new kind of literary genre describing her work as a history of emotions a
history of the soul. Alexievich s distinctive documentary style combining extended individual
monologues with a collage of voices records the stories of ordinary women and men who are
rarely given the opportunity to speak whose experiences are often lost in the official
histories of the nation. In Secondhand Time Alexievich chronicles the demise of communism.
Everyday Russian citizens recount the past thirty years showing us what life was like during
the fall of the Soviet Union and what it s like to live in the new Russia left in its wake.
Through interviews spanning 1991 to 2012 Alexievich takes us behind the propaganda and
contrived media accounts giving us a panoramic portrait of contemporary Russia and Russians
who still carry memories of oppression terror famine massacres but also of pride in their
country hope for the future and a belief that everyone was working and fighting together to
bring about a utopia. Here is an account of life in the aftermath of an idea so powerful it
once dominated a third of the world. A magnificent tapestry of the sorrows and triumphs of the
human spirit woven by a master Secondhand Time tells the stories that together make up the
true history of a nation. Through the voices of those who confided in her The Nation writes
Alexievich tells us about human nature about our dreams our choices about good and evil in a
word about ourselves. Praise for Svetlana Alexievich and Secondhand Time The nonfiction volume
that has done the most to deepen the emotional understanding of Russia during and after the
collapse of the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana Alexievich s oral history Secondhand Time.
David Remnick The New Yorker
