The Wives of Los Alamos

Their average age was twenty-five. They came from Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, London and Chicago – and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure or at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship in the desolate military town where everything was a secret, including what their husbands were doing at the lab. They lived in barely finished houses with a P.O. Box for an address, in a town wreathed with barbed wire, all for the benefit of ‘the project’ that didn’t exist as far as the greater world was concerned. They were constrained by the words they couldn’t say out loud, the letters they couldn’t send home, the freedom they didn’t have. Though they were strangers, they joined together – babies were born, friendships were forged, children grew up. But then ‘the project’ was unleashed and even bigger challenges faced the women of Los Alamos, as they struggled with the burden of their contribution towards the creation of the most destructive force in mankind’s history – the atomic bomb. Contentious, gripping and intimate, The Wives of Los Alamos is a personal tale of one of the most momentous events in our history.

About the Author :
TaraShea Nesbit teaches creative writing and literature courses at the University of Denver and the University of Washington in Tacoma. A graduate of the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis, TaraShea is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Denver, where she is a Presidential Fellow.

Review :
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 Hypnotic and filled with elegiac details; Nesbit offers fascinating and disturbing insight into the secret life of the Los Alamos families 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 A debut novel that manages to be both intimate and detached and is all the more compelling for that **** 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 An insight into the wives of men who worked on the nuclear Manhattan Project in the Forties 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 There’s no individual heroine of this terrific novel; Nesbit tells their collective story – and the details of their lives are fascinating ... Mesmerising 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 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