Front Page Booklist 3
“In the first chapter of this assured debut novel, two young girls vanish, sending shock waves through a town perched on the edge of the remote Kamchatka Peninsula. What follows is a novel of overlapping stories about the women who have been affected by their disappearance. Each richly textured tale pushes the narrative forward another month and exposes the ways in which the women have been shattered by the crime.” (New York Times)
“Higginbotham’s superb account of the April 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is one of those rare books about science and technology that read like a tension-filled thriller. Replete with vivid detail and sharply etched personalities, this narrative of astounding incompetence moves from mistake to mistake, miscalculation to miscalculation, as it builds to the inevitable, history-changing disaster.” (New York Times)
