lyora Gaishun is blind. He is on a bus to the Khatyn memorial with his wife and their son, and the road keeps sliding into memory: the summer he was sixteen and dug a rifle out of a grave to join the partisans, the forest, the hunger, the villages that stood in the morning and were ash by nightfall. Ales Adamovich was that boy. He fought with a partisan unit in Belarus as a teenager, and he spent the rest of his life writing about what war does to ordinary people. Khatyn, written between 1965 and 1971, is his central work. It later fed the screenplay he wrote with Elem Klimov for Come and See, still one of the most unflinching films ever made about the Second World War, whose young protagonist carries the same name as this novel's narrator. More than 9,200 villages were destroyed in Belarus during the war. In over 600 of them almost every inhabitant was killed or burned alive. Adamovich refuses to report this from a safe distance. He writes from inside a boy's eyes, in prose that stammers, circles and will not settle, and he sets survivor testimony directly against the fiction, so the reader hears the voices of people who walked out of the fire. The result is a book about memory as much as war: what a country does with its dead, and what it costs a man to go back and look. This edition has been revised and fully proofread throughout. Translated by Glenys Kozlov, Frances Longman and Sharon McKee.