ABOUT
THE BOOK

Chernobyl, 26 April 1986. Things were ruined overnight in that quiet town of Ukraine. An experiment to produce electricity from the residual energy in the steam generator of Reactor Four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station went horribly wrong, bringing on an explosion that blew away the reactor’s roof and set afire the graphite in its core. The blaze lasted several days, casting huge quantities of radioactivity a thousand metres up into the atmosphere. And it was a long time before the local people were evacuated.

This is the story of what came after. What happened to the people of Chernobyl? How did innocuous atoms – which make all things, even us – connive to unleash destruction so vicious that there was little left to be salvaged? Did the world learn any lessons from the tragedy? Told in the voices of many victims, this elegiac novel recounts how their bodies, lives and loves, realities and memories were distorted forever, and how the very air around them was irrevocably changed.