While the team of scientists assembled by J. Robert Oppenheimer races to create the atom bomb at Los Alamos, their families find themselves in a sequestered world in the desert, cut off from everyone and everything they know. Vromen invents a brilliant cast of wives, teenage girls, technicians and physicists, who we come to love. The nature of their husbands’ work is strictly secret. Family life outside the labs is intense and conflicted, a world simmering and bubbling as it threatens to boil over. Even casual correspondence is so heavily censored that family members can barely communicate with friends and relatives back home. Oppenheimer and his team members are portrayed with compassion and wit, as all of Vromen’s characters battle their demons while the world is reinvented.
In a desert outpost, nuclear scientists and their families face the toll of the secrets they keep from the world and from each other in this gripping wartime novel from debut author Galina Vromen.
Los Alamos, 1943. The US Army has gathered scientists to create the world's first nuclear weapon. Their families, abruptly moved to the secret desert base with no explanation, have simple orders: Stand by. Make do. Above all, don't ask questions.
Christine, forced to abandon her art restoration business in New York for her husband's career, struggles to reinvent herself and cope with his increasing aloofness.
Ben Fountain’s extraordinary ability to weave together politics with profound character studies is on full display in Devil Makes Three. Fountain sets his tale during the political upheaval in Haiti in 1991 when President Aristide was overthrown. We follow an American expat scuba instructor who soon finds himself out of business and in over his head, and a Haitian grad student who has returned to her family from the US just in time for in the chaotic and violent aftermath of the coup. Each of them must make decisions about how and when to take a stand while navigating politics they only partially grasp. Fountain’s gifts are in telling about such convoluted times with humor and sympathy, while making both of his main characters equally compelling and fully realized.
WINNER OF THE 2024 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE • WASHINGTON POST BEST FICTION OF 2023 • From the award-winning, bestselling author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk comes a brilliant and propulsive new novel about greed, power, and American complicity set in Haiti
"An engrossing, psychologically complex and politically astute novel." ―The New York Times
Haiti, 1991. When a violent coup d’état leads to the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, American expat Matt Amaker is forced to abandon his idyllic, beachfront scuba business. With the rise of a brutal military dictatorship…
My Friends is a quiet novel about big subjects – friendship, exile and resistance. It takes us back to a crucial moment, when Libyan officials opened fire on anti-Qaddafi protesters from inside the Libyan embassy in London, killing several and wounding others, including the novel’s narrator. This proves the turning point in his life, stranding him in London and cutting him off from his family back home. His friendships with two Libyan expats are put to the test as each responds in dramatically different ways to unfolding events back home and the ultimate collapse of the Qaddafi regime. Matar knows how to tell a story with insight and compassion, resisting the temptation to bombast while keeping us engaged.
Adam Unrehearsed is a National Jewish Book Awards Finalist, a moving and hilarious coming-of-age comedy, that transports readers back to the fraught and exhilarating New York of the early 1970s in a story of friendship, betrayal, death, and acting. From the moment he’s mugged on the subway home from Yankee Stadium, things go wrong for irrepressible 12-year-old Adam Miller. He faces gangs, anti-Semitism, and practical jokes that go too far. He loses his old friends and makes new ones in surprising places. Hoping to survive until his bar mitzvah, Adam finds solace onstage, where he discovers the power of theater to bridge social divides. “Comical, lyrical, menacing, gritty, tender… compassionate and propulsive…and it rings true… a sure handed debut…” Colum McCann “Don Futterman has written a classic… hilarious… deeply moving…” Yossi Klein Halevi “Funny, wise, heartbreaking and heart-healing Futterman’s novel reaches across time… to bore into the universalities of youth.” Pamela Schoenewaldt - Historical Novel Society Adam Unrehearsed could not be more timely. Listen also to my comic autobiographical monologues on my performance podcast, Futterman’s One-Man Show.
