The Thirty Kilometre Zone\u27 is about a man who becomes lost in the shadows of an unspeakable and unvoiced past, who sets off into the core of his mother\u27s secrets with the hope of somehow finding a way out of the traumatic cycles that have defined them both. Through a parallel narrative, long-eluded memories overtake his mother\u27s dying mind, the very past shielded by a silence meant to save her son from sorrow. The themes of Chornobyl and Stalin\u27s Famine-Genocides are interwoven through a mainly contemporary setting. After the accident at Chornobyl, Ukraine, authorities defined the fallout field by means of three successive contamination zones extending from the power plant. The radioactive environment has been termed the exclusion zone, the alienation zone, or the thirty kilometer zone. It is this motif that informs both the narrative\u27s themes and title
