An engrossing and thought-provoking novel.
As Japan teeters on the abyss of doom, a strange American bomb falls into its hands.
In 1945, B-29s turn Japanese cities into fiery hellscapes, but Japan fights on in a hopeless cause. A U.S. bomber nicknamed Wicked Intent crashes and kills its crew. Japanese civilians who discover the wreckage don’t know what to make of the puzzling object that had been inside and is buried in the dirt nearby, looking “like a big black daikon radish.” They conclude it’s the biggest bomb anyone has ever seen. Inside the device are rings of metal no one recognizes, but a simple chemistry lab test shows it to be uranium. Army Lt. Col. Shingen Sagara understands the significance. He knows about Japan’s own unsuccessful efforts to enrich uranium. To figure out how to make the stray bomb workable to unleash horror on enemy forces or even on America itself, he recruits the U.S.-educated physicist Keizo Kan, who has been working in his garden. The scientist despises war, and he desperately wants to find his beloved American-born wife, Noriko, who has been arrested and detained for unknown reasons. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay area, they share a deep fondness for U.S. movies: “Taylor loves Garbo,” he tells her before the war. “Garbo loves Taylor,” she responds with a kiss. From a distance Sagara witnesses the fireball over Hiroshima, and he knows what it is. He will do everything in his power to have the discovered bomb loaded onto a plane to smite America. Nagasaki soon follows, as history confirms. But the fictional third atomic bomb might still deliver a devastating blow. Meanwhile, there is talk of a coup to overthrow the “defeatists” who want to surrender. The plot feels entirely plausible, and none of the characters fit any obvious stereotypes. Sagara, the antagonist, is addicted to Philopon, a methamphetamine that drives his relentless work. (This was a real product considered so dangerous that Japan banned it after the war.) Were it up to him, every Japanese citizen would “eat stones”—fight to the death. The author’s research is impressive as he describes how the bomb is designed to work, the tensions within the Japanese power structure, and details of Japanese culture.
An engrossing and thought-provoking novel.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781668083055
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: today
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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