Excerpt from The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

A few of us of us had experienced secrecy already. Our husbands were professors at Columbia or the University of Chicago and just that past month the Physics Lab was renamed the Metallurgical Lab, though no one in the lab, especially our husbands, were metallurgists, or did any kind of metal extracting. The college hired armed guards to be posted inside the doors of the Metallurgical Lab, and in the last weeks even the wives were no longer permitted to enter.

Our husbands said, I'll go on ahead, or, We'll all go together, or, I can't say when I will arrive but you should get on the train and set up house now. We suggested our husbands take a job in Canada instead. They declined the suggestion. And if they told us we were going to the Southwest, perhaps saying, We are going away and that's the end of the discussion, we went to the university library and found the only three travel books about the Southwest. And the card in the back pocket of the New Mexico book had the names of our husbands' colleagues who disappeared weeks before to some strange wilderness, people had said. We knew then that New Mexico was probably where we were going, too. We felt we had partially solved the mystery. If our husbands told us, We are going away and that's the end of the discussion, we knew not to ask another thing, and we kept our partially solved mysteries to ourselves.

Those of us with husbands who were going to have manager in their titles got to know, immediately, the general location of our future home. Our husbands informed us we were going to Site Y, outside Santa Fe. We wrote a list of things we wanted to know about our new town for our husbands to ask them about— we did not know who they and them were. We typed: How are the schools? Is there a hospital? Is there adequate help? What size are the windows? How is the weather? Replies came back from our husbands over dinner as they passed the Brussels sprouts. They told us, Rest assured, your children will receive the finest education. And, The hospital will take care of all your needs. And, You will be provided with excellent cleaning and childcare help. The roads can get muddy— bring your rubbers! We raised our eyebrows. It sounded funny, official, and suspect, but we said, That sounds nice. We were not told that the school, the homes, and the hospital had not yet been built. A week before we left, a gentleman came to the door, showed us a badge, and said, Do you mind if I ask you a few questions? Over iced tea and stale sugar cookies we were quizzed about our presence at a Marxist Pedagogy meeting in 1940, or we were asked why we were on the list of members of the League of Women Shoppers, and didn't we know that that organization was a Communist front? We were only a year out of Russia and was it true we had been captains in the Russian Army? Was it true we taught English classes for the Communist Party worker's school in Youngstown, Ohio?

It was likely our husbands were questioned as well, though many were less interested in discussing the interrogation. We told the short man with the inscrutable expressions that we wanted nothing to do with the Communist Party, that we were never involved, or that we weren't involved anymore. We said we had only been associated with them because of a previous love affair, and we did not see the point anymore, or we had become disillusioned after Pearl Harbor. We were asked to name our affiliates, and we said it was difficult to recall the people we knew then, that our memory was fuzzy on the dates and locations. We said this even if our memory was not fuzzy. We did not want to get anyone in trouble. Judging by his scowling face, this man did not like these answers. However, he went away, and no one else came to see us, and so it seemed we were still leaving for the wilderness.

Excerpted from The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit. Copyright © 2014 by TaraShea Nesbit. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.