Boys in Zinc
A Nobel laureate's devastating portrait of the Soviet-Afghan War, drawn from the mouths of those who lived it. Between 1979 and 1989, Soviet forces fought a brutal and largely hidden war in Afghanistan. Thousands died. The bodies came home in sealed zinc coffins, while official language spoke only of peacekeeping. The gap between those two realities is where this book lives. Svetlana Alexievich gathers the raw, unguarded accounts of soldiers, nurses, doctors, mothers, wives and siblings, letting their words build a composite picture of conflict that no single narrator could provide. It's an approach that suits the subject perfectly. War, after all, is not one story. It's hundreds of fractured ones. What emerges is quietly devastating: the ugliness of combat sitting alongside tender, fleeting moments of ordinary life; veterans returning to a society that neither understood nor welcomed them; families left to grieve in silence, with no official acknowledgement of what they'd lost. Alexievich holds all of this together without editorialising, which makes it hit harder. First published in the USSR in 1991, the book caused considerable uproar for its refusal to soften or romanticise. This edition presents a fresh translation based on Alexievich's revised text, making it more accessible to English readers than ever before. Uncomfortable and necessary, Boys in Zinc is the kind of book that stays with you long after you've closed the cover.
- Author: Svetlana Alexievich
- Publisher: Penguin Classics
- Genre: Journalism & Media Studies
- ISBN: 978-0241264119
- Pages: 304 pages