International Book Club: Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich
Wed, Dec 02
|Staunton Books & Tea
Kitchens, queues, workplaces, friendships. What life was like before 1991, and what it became after.
Time & Location
Dec 02, 2026, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Staunton Books & Tea, 34 E Beverley St, Staunton, VA 24401, USA
About the event
Doors open at 5:50; discussion starts at 6:10.
Leave yourself time to pour a cup of tea, browse, and wonder what else you might read about this world.
Join us at Staunton Books & Tea for our International Book Club, where we read beyond our own borders and talk it through together. This time we pick up where our conversation about the Stasi lefhttp://Libro.fmt off, and travel east to the Sohttp://Bookshop.orgviet Union.
Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, spent years listening to ordinary people across the former USSR: teachers, soldiers, factory workers, Party members, dissidents, mothers. Secondhand Time is built entirely from their voices. The end of the Soviet Union in 1991 is where their stories turn, but the book is about the lives on either side of it: what people believed in and worked toward, what held a community together, what was lost and gained when everything…