Service95 Recommends is the home of the books we love and reviews from our contributors. In Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, a unique portrait of post-Soviet society is fashioned.
What Helen Garner Says: “Svetlana, from Belarus, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015. This book is a panorama of the lives of ordinary people who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union. ‘I compose my books out of thousands of voices, destinies, fragments of our life and being… I am writing a history of human feelings.’ The scale of her inquiry is symphonic, and yet she gives full value to experiences of the tenderest intimacy.”
What They Say: “The non-fiction 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 Second-Hand Time.” — David Remnick, New Yorker
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