Reactor: A Book about Grief and Repair

'One of the finest accounts of the mysterious workings of grief I have ever read.' Helen Macdonald
'Completely compelling.' Olivia Laing
'Read it with awe and sorrow.' Fatima Bhutto

After the sudden death of his father, Nick Blackburn embarks on a singular, labyrinthine journey to understand his loss. How do you create an existence when all you can see is a void?

The Reactor is a memoir about absence and creative possibilities, assembled like the pieces of a puzzle. Through philosophy, music, fashion, psychology, art and film, Blackburn travels a vast panorama of ideas and characters to offer an entirely new exploration of grief. This is a book about looking for and finding chain reactions and human connection - a work of enduring fragmentary beauty.



Nick Blackburn's The Reactor is devastatingly affecting. An episodic, elegiac bricolage of everyday life and longing, it's fiercely brilliant, raw, and beautiful, and one of the finest accounts of the mysterious workings of grief I have ever read. It pulled my heart to absolute pieces and left me reeling with love. -- Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk and Vesper Flights

The Reactor captures the fragmenting, kaleidoscopic nature of grief brilliantly, shattering itself over the page to show us not only how we are broken, but how we might put ourselves together again. -- Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide

Blackburn's endless knowledge and curiosity about the history of nuclear disasters can be abstracted into a metaphor - for life and death, for beauty. -- Orit Gat ― The White Review

'Beautiful, strange and completely compelling.' -- Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City and Everybody

Throughout there are passages of great beauty and an engaging self-awareness . . . The Reactor possibly has more in common with Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This than a conventional memoir . . . Blackburn's brave, remarkable book never offers trite grief-wisdom or neat resolutions, but intimates that regrowth might be possible: "radioactive atoms want to become stable again". -- James Cook ― Times Literary Supplement