Stalking the Atomic City

'Remarkable' GUARDIAN
'Mesmerising' TELEGRAPH
'A voice that must be heard' PATTI SMITH

An exhilarating, immersive journey into the Exclusion Zone of Chornobyl with the disaffected adventurers who illegally stalk its ruins

Amidst the toxic desolation of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, a subculture has sprung up. They call themselves 'stalkers': wild adventurers who sneak past border controls to get lost in this apocalyptic environment of dense swampland and rusted ruins. Markiyan Kamysh is one, and here he takes us on a hallucinatory journey into an alien world.

With reckless energy, Kamysh tells of escapes from the police, hedonistic nights in bombed-out buildings and the spectral beauty that got him hooked on returning to the Zone. Brash, immersive and ecstatic, this is a singular document of a dystopian reality.

'An existential travel guide and an experiment in gonzo psychogeography, it stirs obvious comparisons with Hunter S Thompson... mesmerising' - The Telegraph

'A voice that must be heard' - Patti Smith (via Instagram)

'Kamyshs throbbing, fragmentary prose offers heart-stopping insight into what drives those who choose to trespass in dangerous places: reckless abandon in abandoned places' - Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment

'Kamysh has made us understand why he thinks the zone around Chornobyl is so special, why - because of its desolate serenity, and the freedom it grants from the strictures of normal life - it may even be worth dying for. No mean feat... Remarkable' - Guardian

'A brilliant, angry, witty, passionate book about the end of the future and what happens afterwards - Tarkovsky meets Hunter S. Thompson. Read it' - Kevin Power, author of White City

Markiyan Kamysh is a Ukrainian writer who represents the Chornobyl underground in literature. Since 2010, he has illegally explored the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. He is the son of a Chornobyl liquidator, nuclear physicist and design engineer of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Kyiv who died in 2003. Stalking the Atomic City, his first book, has been translated into multiple languages and published to great acclaim. He lives in Kyiv, Ukraine. See more photos on his Instagram @markiyankamysh.

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