Where are you going, Iryna?

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Someone once said that what makes a literarywork is what we might call "excellent use oflanguage". Well, the novel "Where are you going, Iryna?" is undoubtedly a perfect example of this, packed with rare quality and sensitivity. Combininggreat narrative style and extreme delicacy, the author shows us the grim reality for thepeople of Ukraine of the tragedy that happenedat Chernobyl on 26 April 1986 during and afterthe accident at the nuclear power station.The story focuses on the character of Iryna, the people around her, and the experiences sheand her brother Vasyl have in Catalonia with ahost family when they are children. Flashingbackwards and forwards in time without everlosing clarity, the novel places us at differentperiods in Iryna's exciting life as, despite theserious difficulties she often faces, she managesto maintain her enthusiasm and desire to get on.Iryna's story is inspiring but also reminds us ofjust how far human beings can go wrong when wefail to calibrate certain technological applicationscorrectly. The Chernobyl disaster should certainlynot be forgotten considering that the price wenormally pay when we lose our collectivememory is repeating the same mistakes.All this makes Rosa Maria Pascual's novel anexcellent, must-read book for remembering whatit means to contaminate land for centuries- something that should never, ever happen again.I was a young journalist in the UK when the nuclear accidentat Chernobyl happened. At first it seemed like another of themany terrible things that happen in far-off countries andmake only brief headlines in our media before quickly disappearingfrom the front pages. Soon, though, a radioactivecloud began spreading across Europe and, perhaps for thefirst time, we were all forced to realise what a small, fragileworld we live in.Three decades on, Rosa Maria Pascual's splendid noveltells the stories that weren't heard at the time: what happened- and is still happening - to the people living aroundthe nuclear power station in what was then the Soviet Unionand is now Ukraine. From the first page it is a compellingread: a multi-stranded road movie of a book interweavingfirst-hand accounts of the explosion itself and its horrificconsequences, the journey of a woman from far-away Cataloniato discover the truth of the disaster as she helps childrenaffected by its consequences, and the odyssey of oneof those Chernobyl children who goes on the run with heryoung daughter to escape an unpleasant fate in her owncountry.There's a lot more too. This is a book about nationalismand politics, about human nature, about little-known culturesand, most of all, about women and their defiant love forparents, children, husbands and lovers, set against a backgroundof disaster and tragedy. Because even in the darkestsituations, love offers a glimmer of hope for us all.