One of AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of 2019!

A New York Times Best Book of the Year

A Time Greatest Book of the Year

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Reserve of the entire year

2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Brilliance Finalist

Journalist Adam Higginbotham’s definitive, years-in-the-making accounts from the Chernobyl nuclear power place disaster—and a robust investigation into how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the real story of 1 from the twentieth century’s ideal disasters.

Early in on the subject of Midnight in Chernobyl: THE STORYPLOT of the World’s Best Nuclear Disaster the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor NUMBER 4 of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster. In the thirty years since that time, Chernobyl is becoming lodged in the collective nightmares of the globe: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology sliding its leash, for ecological fragility, as well as for what can happen whenever a dishonest and careless condition endangers its citizens and the whole planet. But the real story of the incident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, provides long continued to be in dispute.

Drawing on thousands of hours of interviews executed during the period of a lot more than ten years, as well as characters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham has written a harrowing and powerful narrative which provides the disaster alive through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The effect is a masterful nonfiction thriller, and the definitive account of a meeting that changed background: a story that is more complex, more human being, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth.

Midnight in Chernobyl can be an indelible family portrait of 1 of the fantastic disasters from the twentieth century, of individual resilience and ingenuity, and the lessons learned when mankind seeks to flex the natural globe to his will—lessons which, in the face of climate transformation and other threats, remain not only vital but required.