The sound of a thousand stars A novel

Robbins (In Lieu of Flowers) explores ambition, love, and nuclear destruction in her introspective latest. Alice Katz, a young Jewish woman, jumps at the chance to work on the Manhattan Project and defies the wishes of her wealthy San Francisco family to travel to Los Alamos, N.Mex., in 1944. She's engaged, but her fiancé is fighting in Belgium, and she's excited to meet fellow recruit Caleb Blum, who was working on his doctorate at Berkeley when he took the job at Los Alamos to help his poor Orthodox Jewish parents avoid foreclosure. Despite their disparate socioeconomic backgrounds, Caleb and Alice act on their mutual attraction, and she gets pregnant. Their relationship is complicated by Caleb's fear that Alice will regret marrying someone as poor as him and by the unknown outcome of their efforts to create such a destructive bomb. Interspersed with the narrative of the fast-paced work at Los Alamos are the recollections of Hiroshima survivor Haruki Sato in 1966, who recounts the bomb's devastation. Robbins successfully instills her characters with conflicting emotions about creating a war-ending weapon and its cost on human lives. Readers will be riveted. (Oct.)

A female physicist from an affluent family and a poor engineer begin a fraught romance while working on the Manhattan Project in Robbins' historical novel. In 1944, Alice Katz and Caleb Blum begin working on the fiercely secretive Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the tutelage of the famous J. Robert Oppenheimer. They have little in common--she has a doctorate in physics and hails from a wildly wealthy background while his Orthodox Jewish family is so destitute he cannot afford to continue his academic studies in engineering. He works for the Special Engineer Detachment, an outfit often looked down upon as a cohort of expendable grunts, while Alice is handpicked by Oppenheimer as one of his "preferred understudies," though she still contends with the unabashed chauvinism of her male colleagues. Despite the circumstances that separate them, the pair falls deeply in love; the affair is given room to grow when Alice's fiancé, Warren, dies serving in the war and she subsequently discovers she is pregnant with Caleb's child. In this powerful historical narrative, the obstacles to the protagonists' union are legion, including Caleb's reluctance to disclose the inauspiciousness of his origins. Robbins artfully creates an atmosphere of world-historical dread--only slowly, and with growing horror, do Caleb and Alice learn the full truth of what they are producing at Los Alamos. The story also charts the forlorn plight of Haruki Sato, a Japanese native of Hiroshima whose entire life is haunted by the atomic monstrosity to which both Caleb and Alice contribute. The novel is spangled with sparklingly insightful portraits of major scientific figures like Oppenheimer, Bohr, and Feynman, and the author demonstrates an impressive command of the relevant science as well. This is a moving blend of fact, fiction, and romance. An absorbing novel that radiates historical rigor and emotional astuteness. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.