When fictional time travel is done right — think Jack Finney’s classic “Time and Again” or Stephen King’s “11/22/63” — it’s hard to resist. There’s the allure of enhancing the story (yours or the world’s) and the inherent tension of unintended consequences. Any event you modify, no matter how small, is a domino ready to exploit the next event, and the next.

“Atomic Anna”, Rachel Barenbaum’s second novel (out now), time travels properly.

Barenbaum, who lives in Brookline, doesn’t seem to be doing anything small. She has multiple degrees from Harvard (in business, literature and philosophy), was a hedge fund manager before turning to fiction, and has written for publications such as Los Angeles Review of Books and Literary Hub. She also hosts the “Debut Spotlight” podcast, where she interviews authors about their new work.

With “Atomic Anna,” Barenbaum has crafted a saga that manages to be both sweeping and compelling. They are mainly three women: Anna, an atomic physicist; his daughter Molly, a comic artist; and the daughter of Molly Raisa, a math genius. Their overarching narrative encompasses an immigrant story and a love story; the destructive power of family secrets and the regenerative power of friendship. These are all surrounded by complex physics, which Barenbaum describes in prose that is as elegant as it is accessible.

“Atomic Anna” opens in April 1986, the night of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Here, “open” seems more appropriate than “begin”, because the first page of the book plunges you directly into the action in progress.

At the time of the explosion and collapse of Chernobyl, the now elderly Anna was in her flat in nearby Pripyat, holding a small amplifier she had designed to control electromagnetic waves. The massive nuclear reaction blasts her through time.

Anna lands a few years in the future, on December 8, 1992, at a scientific research station on Mount Aragats in Armenia. Inside the building is her adult daughter Molly, whom Anna has not seen since Molly was a baby in the 1950s. Molly was shot and told Anna “The reaction caused the jump. We’re out of time. Shortly after, Anna is transported back to 1986 and her apartment, now clutching her amplifier with burnt hands.

Although her time travel was unexpected, Anna isn’t completely surprised. Alone, Anna had been working on the time travel puzzle for decades, ever since she was a young Soviet physicist in the 1930s. She became convinced that she could “find a way to use electromagnetic waves to access to ripples in space-time – to bend time”.

Anna must find out why she was drawn to 1992 and her lost daughter. She also knows that as the leader of the team that built Chernobyl, she will be blamed for the collapse. She leaves in secret to go to Mount Aragats, to find answers about her lost daughter and more about Chernobyl.

In the early 1950s, Anna had helped her best friend Yulia and her husband Lazar flee to America and raise Anna’s baby, Molly, to give her a bigger life than she would have had in the Soviet Union. Growing up in the tight-knit Little Russia neighborhood of Philadelphia, Molly recalls her adoptive parents reading Life magazine “like a set of instructions on what Americans were supposed to think and do.”

In the 1960s, teenage Molly clashes with Yulia and Lazar over everything from clothes to schoolwork. A gifted artist, Molly wants to tell stories through comics, a world “dominated by characters, shapes and feelings”. She creates her own comic book series, “Atomic Anna”. The title character, based on her biological mother, leads a trio of all-female superheroes who battle villains in a snowy mountain range. And yet, Molly still wonders if Anna in real life used her intellect for good or ill in Russia; Yulia and Lazar share little of their past life with her.

Anna can now jump to specific times in the 1970s and 1980s, all with the goal of fixing Chernobyl and fixing her family. There is a lot to fix. In the 1970s, Molly slips into a disastrous relationship with Viktor, a local drug dealer, and descends with him into a spiral of booze and pills. When Molly has their daughter Raisa, she is a neglectful mother at best.

Fortunately, Raisa is supernaturally self-sufficient, walking past her sleeping mother on her way to elementary school each day. Raisa also shares her grandmother’s scientific prowess, and more. She learns from borrowed or stolen library books (the “numerical symbols and diagrams were the most beautiful things she had ever seen, and she knew she had to find a way to understand them”).

Even more fortunate, Raisa sometimes has someone in her life who helps her on a larger and safer path. they include a very caring teacher and a boy whose family fled Chernobyl and settled in a house on Rue de Raisa. By the time Raisa is in high school, her math skills surpass even textbooks. At least that’s one of Raisa’s timelines.

At the Mount Aragats Science Station in the 1980s, Molly chronicles Anna’s improvements on the amplifier by creating timeless numbers of “Atomic Anna”. With each time jump, Anna learns more about the principles and dangers of time travel. Anna can stay in a time destination for just two hours (which also helps keep the story tense). She can switch to a particular year no more than twice; after that the ripples become too flat to enter. When in destination time, Anna can’t get too close to her past; the proximity causes him to suffer from headaches and other pains.

Time travel impacts both mind and body; Anna doesn’t know how many more jumps she will be strong enough to do. If she can only change one thing, her family or Chernobyl, how does she choose? In different ways throughout this novel, Barenbaum poses versions of this question to each of the main characters: How do you decide what is most important to you?

Time jumps advance the overall story even though each time jump alters an individual’s story. It would be confusing if it weren’t for Barenbaum’s storytelling skills and the way she structured the book. Each chapter is named after the character from whose perspective that chapter is written, and also includes the date and location of the action.

Even without the dazzling time travel, these characters and storylines would be compelling. With it, they pierce.

In the book’s acknowledgments, Barenbaum notes that her inspiration for “Atomic Anna” was a 2020 New York Times article about an “actual cosmic ray research station on Mount Aragats.” Countless people have read this article. Only Barenbaum used it as a launching pad to create a beautifully crafted, multi-dimensional novel.