The Wives of Los Alamos

The Wives of Los Alamos (2014) by Tarashea Nesbit. This is a short but extraordinarily evocative novel about the Manhattan Project, as seen through the eyes of the families of the men who built the Bomb. It starts in 1943, when the Director goes around recruiting talent, and the wives of the scientists start being kept in the dark. At first, they can't be told where they will be moving, only that it will be "in the desert" or "in the Southwest." Then they learn that their husbands can't tell them anything about the nature of the work they will be doing. Only through deduction do the wives figure out that it must have something to do with the War. And in the end, it is only when the Bomb is dropped on Japan that the women learn that that is what their husbands have been working on all along. Told in the first-person plural ("we"), the book is occasionally irritating in its switchbacks and self-contradictions, but for the most part is propulsively fascinating as, of course, the reader knows all along what the men are working on. I read it compulsively and quickly, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Grade: A-