Named a Most Anticipated Book by Bookish
 
Named a Best Book of the Month by Buzzfeed

"The novel is masterfully plotted.”—New York Times Book Review

“Atomic Anna is a dazzling work of ingenuity and imagination.”―Téa Obreht,National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Inland

From the author of A Bend in the Stars, an epic adventure as three generations of women work together and travel through time to prevent the Chernobyl disaster and right the wrongs of their past.
 
Three brilliant women.
Two life-changing mistakes.
One chance to reset the future.

In 1986, nuclear scientist Anna Berkova is asleep in her bed in the Soviet Union when Chernobyl's reactor melts down. The energy surge accidentally sends her through time. When she wakes up, she's in 1992 and discovers Molly, her estranged daughter, shot in the chest. Should Anna travel in time to save her daughter or stop Chernobyl?

Anna goes to '60s Philadelphia, where Molly is coming of age as an adopted refusenik in a family full of secrets. Molly finds solace in comic books, drawing her own series, Atomic Anna. But when she meets volatile Viktor, their romance sets her life on a dangerous course. Anna then seeks out Molly's daughter, Raisa, in the '80s. Raisa is a lonely teen and math prodigy, who finds new issues of Atomic Anna in unexpected places. Each comic challenges her to solve equations leading to two impossible conclusions: Time travel is real and so is the strange old woman claiming to be her grandmother. 

These three remarkable women must work together across time to prevent the greatest nuclear disaster of the twentieth century, but simply because you can change the past, does it mean you should? 

Rachel Barenbaum's debut novel, A Bend in the Stars, was a Boston Globe bestseller, a New York Times Summer Reading Selection and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. Rachel is a prolific writer and reviewer for the Los Angeles Review of Books and DeadDarlings. She is a graduate of GrubStreet's "Novel Incubator." In a former life she was a hedge fund manager and a spin instructor. She has degrees from Harvard in Business and Literature and Philosophy. She lives in Hanover, NH, with her husband, three children, and dog named Zishe—after the folk hero who inspires many tales around their dinner table.