On April 26, 1986, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor of the fourth power block at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This accident was characterized as the greatest technological disaster of the 20th century. Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich (Nobel Prize in Literature 2015), ten years after the "accident," wandered through the exclusion zone, spoke with dozens of people, searched newspapers, archives, hospitals, and sought the threads of loss in the former Soviet territory. One hundred of these testimonies formed this book: men, women, children, peasants, soldiers, students, firefighters, scientists, the dying, and relatives of the dying, mothers who gave birth to deformed children, students who no longer meet at school, farmers uprooted from the exclusion zone, parents who buried their children, women who saw their husbands melt alive before they died, elders who remember the old prophecies, girls who hide their origins because if they reveal them they will not find a life partner. "Recording them, I felt as if I were recording the future," Alexievich writes in her unique testimony within the polyphonic book.

This is the great, yet heartbreaking masterpiece of Alexievich, one of the most significant books of the 20th century, which, after Anne Frank and Primo Levi, redefined the concept of testimonial literature. A bitter book of indescribable gloom, which page by page becomes a gospel of desperate and passionate love.