For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. 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. 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.

Alexievich’s Nobel win was unexpected because her books are non-fiction, a kind of oral history (although as this New Republic article points out, she takes considerable liberties with the testimonies she collects).

It becomes clear how many of the deaths were unnecessary, how many lives were sacrificed because people didn’t understand or didn’t care about the need to protect people from the radiation, or because they had become used to covering up bad news and didn’t want to admit the severity of the disaster. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page.

Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. At which point, when you consider the extent to which she has been traversing the irradiated landscape, you realise she has put herself on the line in a way very few authors ever do.A true history of its people need be no more than the howls of despair of millions of voices, punctuated by moments of incredible tenderness, courage and grim humour. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985) , Last Witnesses (1985), Boys in Zinc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-Hand Time (2013). Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own, distinctive non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. 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. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013).

It is almost inviduous to pick out any one part of this account, but its conclusions are laid out in the words of Valentina Timofeyevna Apanaasevich, the wife of just one of a team of workers drafted by the Soviet authorities to work in the contaminated zone. So she stays by his side, and she helps him through the fortnight it takes him to die, as his skin starts peeling off and all his colleagues die one by one. 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? The death toll is highly contested, but when we include indirect deaths from conditions associated with radiation exposure and the resulting hereditary genetic defects, it is possible the number is in the tens of thousands, and still rising. It is timeless and has sparked so much thought about infinity, sacrifice, love and unspeakable grief.The HBO television miniseries Chernobyl often relies on the memories of Pripyat locals, as told by Svetlana Alexievich in her book. Alexievich interviewed more than 500 eyewitnesses, including firefighters, liquidators (members of the cleanup team), politicians, physicians, physicists, and ordinary citizens over a period of 10 years. Note: I took the photos in this post myself, while visiting the Chernobyl site in the summer of 2018. Many of the over 500 interviewees were scientists or engineers who give clear, thoughtful, insightful explanations of what went wrong and why so many of the mitigation efforts were futile.