Dimensions
153 x 234 x 36mm
An extraordinarily original novel of the A-bomb era, comparable to Vonnegut, Delillo, Murakami and Houellebecq in its unsettling power and striking originality.
July 16, 1945. The world's first mushroom cloud, produced by the first atomic bomb, rises above the New Mexico desert. Physicists Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi are there to watch the detonation of their brainchild. The bomb's third 'godfather', Leo Szilard, is in Chicago. As the bomb detonates, all three suddenly find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, eventually establishing that they have, somehow, arrived in the year 2003.
When Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard appear in Santa Fe, Ann, a librarian, and her doting gardener husband, Ben, take them in. With the long-dead scientists for houseguests, Ann and Ben are swept up in a quixotic quest that takes them from Hiroshima to the United Nations on a ramshackle pilgrimage for nuclear disarmament. As the scientists, faced with the dismaying evidence of their nuclear legacy, cross the United States, they attract a growing convoy of groupies, activists, New-Age freeloaders and religious fanatics who believe that Oppenheimer is the Messiah. Meanwhile Ann and Ben fight to save their marriage, threatened by her obsessive devotion to the men of the Manhattan project.
In this heroically mischievous, sweeping tour de force, Lydia Millet tells an apocalyptic fable that marries the personal to the political, confronts the longing for immortality with the desire for redemption, and evokes both the beauty and the tragedy of the nuclear sublime.
