‘Devastating... Often thrilling and always freighted with dread… Admirably artful’

Fascinating… a subtle mixture of biography, memoir, political analysis and detective story… A powerful and important book

Rolin’s writing is haunting, poetic

Rolin proves to be a comforting and companionable guide to a gruesome period of history. Although the past he takes us through is irredeemably bloodthirsty, he confidently leads us back to the present, a seeker of light in a world of uncompromising bleakness

Rolin's tone is lyrical and impressionistic rather than scholarly. He intersperses his own thoughts on Russian history, geography and culture… The overall effect is moving… Rolin's reconstruction of the meteorologist's last hours is masterful… The contribution of Rolin, with his English translator Ros Schwartz, is to bring this story to the non-Russian-speaking world and situate it as part of a broader meditation on the history of the Soviet tragedy. In that he has succeeded, producing an eloquent addition to a violent episode in the history of science in the twentieth century

Astonishing. . . Her years of meticulous listening, her unobtrusiveness and her ear for the telling detail and the memorable story have made her an exceptional witness to modern times. . . This is oral history at its finest and it is also an essay on the power of memory, on what is remembered and what is forgotten

One of the most heart-breaking books I have ever read. . . I urge you to read it

The least well-known wonderful writer I've ever come across

As with her other books, terrifying documentation meets great artfulness of construction

Groundbreaking. . . a mosaic of Russian women's stories - from the home front to the front lines, from foot soldiers to cryptographers to antiaircraft commanders

Alexievich's artistry has raised oral history to a totally different dimension. It is no wonder that her brilliant obsession with what Vasily Grossman called "the brutal truth of war" was suppressed for so long by Soviet censors, because her unprecedented pen portraits and interviews reveal the face of war hidden by propaganda

The Belarusian writer has spent decades in listening mode. Alexievich put in thousands of hours with her tape recorder across the lands of the former Soviet Union, collecting and collating stories from ordinary people. She wove those tales into elegant books of such power and insight, that in 2015 she received the Nobel prize for literature

Alexievich's "documentary novels" are crafted and edited with a reporter's cool eye for detail and a poet's ear for the intricate rhythms of human speech. Reading them is like eavesdropping on a confessional. This is history at its rawest and most uncomfortably intimate. . . The book is not merely a corrective to male-centred accounts of conflict; it is a shattering and sometimes overwhelming experience

A remarkable collection of testimonies. . . Sitting at kitchen tables, Alexievich coaxes out of the women stories that describe a reality vastly different from the officially sanctioned version

Magnificent. . . After decades of the war being remembered by 'men writing about men,' she aims to give voice to an aging generation of women who found themselves dismissed not just as storytellers but also as veterans, mothers and even potential wives. . . Alexievich presents less a straightforward oral history of World War II than a literary excavation of memory itself

A powerful and deeply moving document . . . giving voices to the women who served alongside their male counterparts only to have been rendered invisible, afterward, through sexist societal and bureaucratic systems

Reveals the harrowing, brave, and even quotidian memories of Soviet women whose voices were nearly stifled by the mores of history. These accounts fight our ingrained ideas about what makes a war story

The exploitation of the memory of the war has been the central element of modern Russian ideology. It is what makes Ms Alexievich's work so relevant today

A landmark in the study of female soldiers. . . Alexievich's method is the close interrogation of the past through the collection of individual voices; patient in overcoming cliché, attentive to the unexpected, and restrained in exposition, her writing reaches those far beyond her own experiences and preoccupations, far beyond her generation, and far beyond the lands of the former Soviet Union

Svetlana Alexievich rightly says she is a writer, not a historian. In her hands, the spoken word, even written down, conveys the vividness of individual experience, for it has the power of witness

We should resolve to read this book alongside the world news report. . . Ms. Alexievich never tries to simplify. . . Refusing to pass judgment, crediting all, she listens, suffers and brings to life

An absorbing account of how events 1,300 miles away across the North Sea let to the most drastic cabinet reshuffle in modern British history... Shakespeare's book grips the attention from beginning to end. He conjures the characters and personalities of the senior commanders in the Norwegian campaign with a novelist's flair and eye for detail.

The most prescient book of the year

This book’s fascination is as a joint portrait of the royal couple, the most human of historical actors in England’s greatest political drama.

A highly intelligent, fair and sympathetic biography.

[ An] absorbing biography of Charles I

This is a striking insight into both developing contemporary thought and religious controversies

White King is a lively attempt to make him [Charles I] flesh and blood