Originally published in Great Britain, in 2014, by Penguin Group, Penguin Books, Ltd. --Title page verso. Reprinted in paperback in the U.S. in 2014 with a brief biography and an essay by the author: The Empty City.

In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster the Soviet Union begins to collapse changing forever the lives of a nine-year old child prodigy, his aunt, a leading surgeon, and a teenage boy in a rural village. Russia, 1986. In a run-down apartment block in Moscow, a nine-year-old piano prodigy practices silently for fear of disturbing the neighbours. In a factory on the outskirts of the city, his aunt makes car parts, trying to hide her dissident past. In the hospital, a surgeon immerses himself in his work to avoid facing his failed marriage. And in a rural village in Belarus, a teenage boy wakes up to a sky of the deepest crimson. Outside, the ears of his neighbor's cattle are dripping blood. Ten miles away, at the Chernobyl Power Plant, something unimaginable has happened. Now their lives will change forever. This novel captures the end of an era in the Soviet Union.