Chernobyl, My Love

USSR, 1987. The fate and professional path of twenty-two-year-old Moscow journalist Nadezhda Petrenko could have turned out well if she had not met Vladimir — a forty-year-old engineer-physicist, married and with a reputation for being "morally unstable." When Vladimir went to Chernobyl to deal with the consequences of the disaster, Nadya decided to go after him — even though she understood that she risked losing everything: her job, her family, her friends... What was it — true love or the most fateful mistake of her life?

In this autobiographical novel-memoir, two threads intertwine — the story of desperate feeling and the chronicle of a man-made catastrophe. However, at the center of "Zone" are people: those who lived and worked under extreme tension. Nadezhda Petrenko's sincere, deeply personal narrative, grown out of diaries and journalistic notes, is filled with precise details and everyday particulars of a difficult time.