-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:The Wives of Los Alamos is a bold and emotionally charged debut novel told in the collective voices of the wives of the men who created the atom bomb.
Their average age was twenty-five. They came from Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, London, Chicago - and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure, or at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship as they were forced to adapt to a rugged military town where everything was a secret, including what their husbands were doing at the lab. They lived in barely finished houses with P.O. box addresses in a town wreathed with barbed wire, all for the benefit of a project that didn't exist as far as the public knew. Though they were strangers, they joined together - adapting to a landscape as fierce as it was absorbing, full of the banalities of everyday life and the drama of scientific discovery.
And while the bomb was being invented, babies were born, friendships were forged, children grew up, and Los Alamos gradually transformed from an abandoned school on a hill into a real community: one that was strained by the words they couldn't say out loud, the letters they couldn't send home, the freedom they didn't have. But the end of the war would bring even bigger challenges to the people of Los Alamos, as the scientists and their families struggled with the burden of their contribution to the most destructive force in the history of mankind.
The Wives of Los Alamos is a novel that sheds light onto one of the strangest and most monumental research projects in modern history. It's a testament to a remarkable group of women who carved out a life for themselves, in spite of the chaos of the war and the shroud of intense secrecy.
The Wives of Los Alamos is a provocative novel that boldly re-imagines one of the most monumental periods in our history from an original — and long neglected— women's point of view...continued
Full Review
(623 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Suzanne Reeder).
During World War II an isolated area in the American Southwest became the primary research and development site for the creation of the most destructive force in human history. As part of the Allied mission to vanquish the threat of the German nuclear development program, scientists and engineers built the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This top-secret endeavor had a code name: the Manhattan Project, which TaraShea Nesbit explores from a collective women's point of view in her debut novel, The Wives of Los Alamos. The project received its code name in late 1941. The term came about because the program started under the Manhattan Engineering District of the War Department.
Before the Los Alamos site was chosen, research was ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked The Wives of Los Alamos, try these:
by Alice McDermott
Published 2024
A riveting account of women's lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.
by Kate Quinn
Published 2024
The New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye and The Rose Code returns with a haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.
Gail Godwin, author of Flora
I am in awe of this novel. TaraShea Nesbit's brave and brilliant choice of point of view for these women living inside their earth-shattering secret crucible brings home to us in the fullest way possible that our personal story is never just ours.
.gif)