''Remarkable . . . grips with the force of a thriller'' Robert Macfarlane''The most brilliant and essential book on Chernobyl since that of Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich'' Irish Times** National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2019 **The official death toll of the 1986 Chernobyl accident, ''the worst nuclear disaster in history'', is only 54, and stories today commonly suggest that nature is thriving thereYet award-winning historian Kate Brown uncovers a much more disturbing story, one in which radioactive isotopes caused hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the magnitude of the disaster has been actively suppressed.For years after, Soviet scientists, bureaucrats and civilians were documenting staggering increases in birth defects, child mortality, cancers and other life-altering diseasesWorried that this evidence would blow the lid on the effects of radiation release from Cold War weapons-testing, scientists and diplomats from international organizations, including the UN, t