From 1979 to 1989, a million Soviet troops engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan that claimed 50,000 casualties--and the youth and humanity of many tens of thousands more. In this new translation, Zinky Boys weaves together the candid and affecting testimony of the officers and grunts, doctors and nurses, mothers, sons, and daughters who describe the war and its lasting effects. What emerges is a "masterpiece of reportage" (Timothy Snyder, New York Review of Books) that offers a unique, harrowing, and unforgettably powerful insight into the realities of war. In their Nobel citation, the Swedish Academy called "her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."

"Alexievich serves no ideology, only an ideal: to listen closely enough to the ordinary voices of her time to orchestrate them into extraordinary books." --Philip Gourevitch, New Yorker