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Voices From Chernobyl

By Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Keith Gessen

Picador, 236 pages, $14 paper

April 26 marks the 20th anniversary of the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, the world’s greatest nuclear disaster, and Belarus may never recover. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich spent three years interviewing survivors, and the oral histories she collected in this volume, which won this year’s National Book Critics Circle award for non-fiction, depict unimaginable tragedy with eloquence.