90 seconds to midnight

a hiroshima survivor’s nuclear odyssey

90 Seconds to Midnight tells the gripping and thought-provoking story of Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow, a thirteen-year-old girl living in Hiroshima in 1945, when the city was annihilated by an atomic bomb. Struggling with grief and anger, Thurlow set out to warn the world about the horrors of a nuclear attack in a crusade that has lasted seven decades.

Critical historical events need a personal narrative, and Thurlow is such a storyteller for Hiroshima. 90 Seconds to Midnight recounts Thurlow’s ascent from the netherworld where she saw, heard, and smelled death and her relentless efforts to protect the world from an unspeakable fate. Knowing she would have to live with those nightmares, Thurlow turned them into a force to impel people across the globe to learn from Hiroshima, to admit that yes, it could happen again—and then to take action.

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  • “Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow’s life story captures the horror of nuclear weapons. That a survivor could transcend her experience into a lifetime of activism that has made the world safer is so inspiring. I’ve loved Jacobs’s previous biographical works; in 90 Seconds to Midnight her skill reaches new heights.”

    - Abraham Verghese, author of The Covenant of Water, an Oprah’s Book Club selection

  • “Charlotte Jacobs has a most compelling story to tell—the biography of Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow, a survivor of Hiroshima. Only biography has the power to convey what happened at the dawn of the nuclear age.”

    - Kai Bird, coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

  • “Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow’s story is inspiring, heroic, and profoundly important. This is a remarkable book about a truly remarkable woman.”

    - Eric Schlosser, author of Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, a Pulitzer Prize finalist

  • “This eminently readable book is riveting, timely, and much needed. It offers a unique and deeply affecting first-person account of the unimaginable horrors of Hiroshima through the eyes of Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow, who survived the bombing as a young teen to become a leading witness to the world on the crimes against humanity unleashed by nuclear war. She is a messenger we must hear, and we must heed.”

    - Diana Chapman Walsh, president emerita of Wellesley College and author of The Claims of Life: A Memoir

“I’m not interested in sympathy;
I want your action”
— Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow