Book description
Nora Gallagher’s elegant debut novel is a love story set in Los Alamos in 1945, in the shadow of the creation of the first atomic bomb.During the last summer of World War II, in the beautiful high desert of New Mexico, a young painter, Eleanor Garrigue, discovers a delirious man…
Why read it?
1 author picked Changing Light as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
A spare love story is the vehicle for Eleanor, the main character, to grow emotionally and artistically in her adopted desert landscape.
Through an artist’s eyes and the writer’s beautiful prose, I viewed the dry mesas and encountered the mystery of Leo Kavan, who collapses on Eleanor’s property after escaping the confines of “The Hill,” code name for Los Alamos.
I wrote to Gallagher to find out if Leo was based on Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist who conceived the idea of a chain reaction that leads to the invention of the atomic bomb. She replied, "Fiction is so strange,…
From Tara's list on fiction and poetry books that navigate the atomic age.
If you love Changing Light...
These Blue Mountains
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
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