Georgetown Library Sunday Book Club

A monthly book club

In August we'll discuss Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich.

About the book:

When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions — a history of the soul.” Alexievich’s distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.

In Secondhand Time, Alexievich chronicles the demise of communism. Everyday Russian citizens recount the past thirty years, showing us what life was like during the fall of the Soviet Union and what it’s like to live in the new Russia left in its wake. Through interviews spanning 1991 to 2012, Alexievich takes us behind the propaganda and contrived media accounts, giving us a panoramic portrait of contemporary Russia and Russians who still carry memories of oppression, terror, famine, massacres — but also of pride in their country, hope for the future, and a belief that everyone was working and fighting together to bring about a utopia. Secondhand Time tells the stories that together make up the true history of a nation. 

Request a print copy from the DCPL catalogue or borrow the ebook or eaudiobook from Libby

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