Books Written by Adam Higginbotham

Higginbotham spent over a decade interviewing eyewitnesses and reviewing newly declassified documents to write Midnight in Chernobyl, widely considered the first fully accurate English-language account of the 1986 nuclear disaster. His work is defined by exhaustive, years-long archival and human-source research applied to catastrophic historical events, letting the sheer density of firsthand testimony carry the narrative.

Midnight in Chernobyl remains his most acclaimed book and the essential starting point — an Andrew Carnegie Medal winner and one of the New York Times’s ten best books of 2019.

By Lisanne Swart · 2 books · Disaster History & Investigative Nonfiction · Updated August 2026