First there is the voice of the firefighter’s wife, who was kept from going to her husband because he was a dangerous radioactive object. Then the voice of an old woman unable to see why she has to leave her farm and her village. And, of course, the “clean-up crew,” the soldiers and scientists for whom everything changed on that fateful day in 1986. From the tender and intimate stories of people caring for their loved ones as they deteriorate from radiation sickness to the moving stories of the people in the surrounding cities told suddenly to abandon their homes, this definitive translation of Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s masterpiece closely examines the human realities of the Chernobyl disaster and the half-century we have lived in its shadow.