What if you could tell history through the countless voices of ordinary people who lived through it? In Second-hand Time, Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich invents a new genre as she writes the life stories of housewives, artists, party workers, students, soldiers and traders living through a time of political upheaval - the fall of the Soviet Union and the two decades that followed it. As they tell her their secrets, their passions, their sorrows, their hopes, she builds a picture of a nation and of lived history, as epic as the greatest of novels. One of the most extraordinary books ever written, Second-hand Time is Alexievich's fi nest work.