Belarusian author makes into 100 Best Books of 21st Century

The New York Times Book Review rated the book Secondhand Time by Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich as one of the hundred best works of the 21st century.

The reviewers say Alexievich's book "delights and opens your eyes".

"Of all the 20th century’s grand failed experiments, few came to more inglorious ends than the aspiring empire known, for a scant seven decades, as the U.S.S.R. The death of the dream of Communism reverberates through the Nobel-winning Alexievich’s oral history, and her unflinching portrait of the people who survived the Soviet state (or didn’t) — ex-prisoners, Communist Party officials, ordinary citizens of all stripes — makes for an excoriating, eye-opening read," writes The New York Times Book Review.

For the past five years, Alexievich has been forced to live abroad—in Germany. In 2020, she was a member of the Coordinating Council in Belarus, and she was threatened with prosecution, so she fled the country.