In this fascinating and artful debut, TaraShea Nesbit gives voice to the women closest to one of gravest and most telling moments in our collective history: the development and testing of the nuclear bomb at Los Alamos. Tender and mundane details of marriage and domesticity quietly collide with the covert and solemn work at hand. With chilling implications and charged, sure-footed prose, this is a novel - and writer - of consequence * Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife *
Hypnotic and filled with elegiac details; Nesbit offers fascinating and disturbing insight into the secret life of the Los Alamos families * Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles *
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. The Wives of Los Alamos will be read and re-read and remembered * Gail Godwin, author of Flora *
A debut novel that manages to be both intimate and detached and is all the more compelling for that **** * RTE Guide *
The story is told by all of the women - not queued up as an oral history , but together in unison as one haunting, communal voice ... In the hands of a less certain writer, the narrative style might become grating, but Nesbit pulls it off with impressive control. Lulled by the voice, we know that offstage the historic work is being done ... Because we already know the big story, the wives' tale - this diverse, incongruous ensemble - becomes that much more interesting * New York Times *
An insight into the wives of men who worked on the nuclear Manhattan Project in the Forties * Stylist *
Powering the novel is its narrative voice, a collective we that represents all the wives. This technique may feel initially distancing, but the rhythmic, hypnotic cadences build momentum to create a unique portrait of a rarely considered aspect of a particular historical moment * Daily Mail *
There's no individual heroine of this terrific novel; Nesbit tells their collective story - and the details of their lives are fascinating ... Mesmerising * The Times *
This is a story that will haunt you, as though the ghosts of the desert replayed the women's lives long after they had returned to their home towns with husbands, who were deeply marked by their achievement * Irish Times *
Nesbit empathises with the scientists' wives and skilfully conveys their bleak predicament, which resembles that of any homemaker suffering from isolation. The book gains in dramatic intensity when the goings-on in the lab start to spill out * Independent *
