The Half Life of Valery K

"This is more historical fiction than fantasy. Although I suppose her previous books played very clever games with time and magic, but were anchored in a historical British past that felt completely authentic. They weren’t ‘elves and dwarves’ high fantasy , but there was magic in the world. Valery K has a single, linear timeframe, more or less. There are brief forays into the past, but they’re not essential in the ways the multiple timelines were in previous novels. It opens in a Siberian prison camp in 1963. Valery K, a scientist, is told by the commandant that he’s being sent to a nuclear research facility. He has no idea why, but we soon learn that his old boss who heads the team there has asked for him. The other main protagonist is a KGB officer who is there to make sure Valery does not step out of line. Obviously, he does step out of line, and quite frequently. Valery is a human being who has been pushed to the edges of human tolerance, and what he gradually realises that he’s in an area of super-high radiation. They’re given lovely stopwatches, are not allowed to go out unless they click the stopwatch, and they can only go outside a certain amount of time before they have to come back in again. The KGB agent has children, and his kids are dying—one of them has lymphoid leukaemia. It’s Valery who takes her blood and puts it under the microscope, for instance, so he gradually grows closer to the KGB agent. On one level, it’s a beautiful love story. On another, like Venomous Lumpsucker , there are layers of hypocrisy, and everyone is telling lies. Gradually we grow to understand what caused the meltdown: the huge explosion that wiped out the original facility and caused the radiation damage—and then Valery has to make sure it doesn’t happen again. So this is the thriller knife edge. Is Valery going to survive? Is he going to be sent back to the camp? Will he and Konstantin Shenkov have any kind of future? So I’d say this is an eco-thriller. While it’s not looking at the climate emergency, it still looks deeply at the root causes of why we are where we are."