Fighting for her survival from the notorious tentacles of the KGB, ballerina, Lena Sergeyevna is desperate to locate her husband Yuri, a nuclear physicist at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
Ian Sutherland, in his intelligent, memoir – thriller “Catastrophe”, takes us back to that ill-fated evening of April 26th, 1986, when the lives of hundreds of thousands were destroyed in an instant. Hastening the breakup of the Soviet Union and destroying the natural environment of vast swathes of land, the reasons hinted at in this book are plausible but speculative.
Thirty years later, we discover that Lena, now on her deathbed with thyroid cancer, fervently seeks reconciliation with her estranged daughter. Written in the first-person narrative, Lena tells the story of her deeply compromised life. Protecting the only person who’d stood by her, her grandmother, and desperately craving to be part of something bigger than herself, she pays a heavy price in shame and self-loathing. Her anguished search for Yuri and later exile to the US as an exotic dancer reveals the depth of her torment.
What happened to her husband and to what extent was he involved in the disaster.? As far as she knew, he had been performing top-secret research but how accurate was this? When Lena is approached by several handlers and advised to lie low or face the consequences, our protagonist defies instructions and relentlessly pursues her instincts in search of answers.
I found myself completely invested in this well-edited, and intriguing work of fact-based fiction and had to reread it to take notes! The storyline and well-developed characters as well as the author’s clever and descriptive use of imagery kept me immersed until the last page. I lingered and pondered over the fascinating research that went into this masterpiece of a book. Ian Sutherland unequivocally deserves a full star rating for this piece of literary excellence, and I heartily recommend it to those who enjoy an intelligent mystery thriller with a twist in the tale. It left me contemplating where this master storyteller and wordsmith will take us next.
Review by Lorna Philip Enslin.
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