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HarperPress has bought an offbeat travel guide, charting a journey to the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, the dried out Aral Sea and the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Soviet Union's answer to Cape Canaveral.
Editor Robin Harvie bought world rights, excluding US and Canada, to Toxic Tourism from Antony Topping at Greene and Heaton. The book, by Will Wiles, will be published in spring 2012.
During his travels that feature in the book, Wiles journeyed to museums and memorials associated with the Soviet space and nuclear programmes. The exclusion zone around Chernobyl was only opened to tourism earlier this year.
Harvie said: "Toxic Tourism will be a short, evocative book, a kind of perverse travel guide shot through with black humour, in the vein of David Foster Wallace's essays or the book of Iain Sinclair's Millennium Dome excursion, Sorry Meniscus or PJ O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell."