It was the night of 25th April, 1986, and reactor number 4 at the electricity-producing Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine was scheduled to be shut down for routine maintenance. The workers made the fatal decision to see if, in the event of a shut down, enough electricity would remain in the grid to power the cooling system for the reactor core; they thus turned off the emergency cooling system.

The carnage that ensued was the worst nuclear accident the world has ever known, and the long term effects of the disaster are still being evaluated.

This book represents a personal photographic journey into the abandoned Chernobyl town of Pripyat today, a land largely reclaimed by nature.

It is a journey that takes us inside the exclusion zones right to the heart of the tragedy, the stricken reactor itself, barely contained by the crumbling, decaying sarcophagus which prevents it from unleashing its deadly contents for a second time.