Second-hand Time Signed & Numbered Indie Exclusive Edition

Second-hand Time is published here as a limited edition casebound hardback as part of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ First Decade Collection, featuring marbled endpapers and signed and numbered bookplates.
The First Decade Collection is a hardback limited edition series featuring ten important books from Fitzcarraldo Editions’ first decade of publishing. Designed by art director Ray O’Meara, each book is casebound in fine linen cloth with custom marbled endpapers and signed and numbered book plates, with a run of 1000 copies each.
The First Decade Collection reflects the breadth of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ contemporary publishing, which focuses on ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language, and marks a decade of publishing. The 2015, 2018, 2022 and 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature laureates Svetlana Alexievich, Olga Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux and Jon Fosse are all included in the series, out on 24 October 2024.

Second-hand Time is the latest work from Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. Here she brings to- gether the voices of dozens of witnesses to the collapse of the USSR in a formidable attempt to chart the disappearance of a culture and to surmise what new kind of man may emerge from the rubble. Fashioning a singular, polyphonic literary form by combining ex- tended individual monologues with a collage of voices, Alexievich creates a magnificent requiem to a civilization in ruins, a brilliant, poignant and unique portrait of post-Soviet society out of the stories of ordinary women and men.

‘In this spellbinding book, Svetlana Alexievich orchestrates a rich symphony of Russian voices telling their stories of love and death, joy and sorrow, as they try to make sense of the twentieth century, so tragic for their country.’ - J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.

‘Absolutely fantastic.’ - Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of The Wolves of Eternity.

‘The non-fiction volume that has done the most to deepen the emotional understanding of Russia during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history Second-hand Time.’ - David Remnick, New Yorker.

‘A series of monologues by people across the former Soviet empire, it is Tolstoyan in scope, driven by the idea that history is made not only by major players but also by ordinary people...read more...