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Atomic Anna
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“Atomic Anna is a dazzling work of ingenuity and imagination.”―Téa Obreht,National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Inland
From the author of A Bend in the Stars, an epic adventure as three generations of women work together and travel through time to prevent the Chernobyl disaster and right the wrongs of their past.
Three brilliant women.
Two life-changing mistakes.
One chance to reset the future.
In 1986, renowned nuclear scientist, Anna Berkova, is sleeping in her bed in the Soviet Union when Chernobyl’s reactor melts down. It’s the exact moment she tears through time—and it’s an accident. When she opens her eyes, she’s landed in 1992 only to discover Molly, her estranged daughter, shot in the chest. Molly, with her dying breath, begs Anna to go back in time and stop the disaster, to save Molly’s daughter Raisa, and put their family’s future on a better path.
In ‘60s Philadelphia, Molly is coming of age as an adopted refusenik. Her family is full of secrets and a past they won’t share. She finds solace in comic books, drawing her own series, Atomic Anna, and she’s determined to make it as an artist. When she meets the volatile, charismatic Viktor, their romance sets her life on a very different course.
In the ‘80s, Raisa, is a lonely teen and math prodigy, until a quiet, handsome boy moves in across the street and an odd old woman shows up claiming to be her biological grandmother. As Raisa finds new issues of Atomic Anna in unexpected places, she notices each comic challenges her to solve equations leading to one impossible conclusion: time travel. And she finally understands what she has to do.
As these remarkable women work together to prevent the greatest nuclear disaster of the 20th century, they grapple with the power their discoveries hold. Just because you can change the past, does it mean you should?
Excerpt
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Pirkei Avot, meaning “Chapters of the Fathers,” is a collection of Jewish ethical teachings and stories passed down from generation to generation. It begins with a warning: Be patient in judgment.
Prologue
April 1986
Soviet Union
The scientist Anna Berkova was asleep in her narrow bed in Pripyat, the closed city that housed workers from Chernobyl. She was cold, but then again, she was always cold. The walls in her building were thin. Damp and wind clawed through cracks and she huddled under blankets to escape them. She had fallen asleep working on the amplifier she hoped would increase efficiency at the nuclear power plant, the prototype lying on her chest. It was small and crude, a circuit board covered with diodes and capacitors. She didn’t hear the explosion or feel the catastrophic shudder as Reactor No. 4 ripped apart, its insides flayed, releasing the most dangerous substances known to man. Nor did she witness the shock of light that stabbed the dark, because at that exact moment Anna tore through time. It was her first jump—and it was an accident.
When she opened her eyes, she was on her back in the snow, alone, on a mountain, clutching the smoking amplifier. Her head felt like it was being split in two; her hands throbbed. They were burned and raw; she didn’t know why. She assumed she was dreaming, but she never felt pain in dreams, only fear when nightmares had her seeing soldiers at her door. It was why she still wore boots to bed, even now as an old woman, so she could run from them like her mother should have run all those years ago. But on that mountain there were no soldiers. She put the amplifier in her pocket and her scorched hands in the snow. That hurt even more. Wind slid through her nightgown and scraped at her skin and with every sensation, she was more convinced this wasn’t a dream. This was real. She quickly understood that she needed to find shelter or she would freeze.
She spotted a building in the distance. Smoke stained the sky above, leaking from the chimney. If she could get to that building, inside, she’d be safer. She slipped and clawed her way to her feet and forced herself forward. The building was narrow and long, built with stone. As she stumbled toward it, she passed a spot in the snow that bloomed red with fresh blood trailing in a long line. Her panic grew.
Perhaps the KGB had left her here? It was no secret Gorbachev detested her. Her safety protocols were expensive and slowed production, but without Anna and those protocols there would be no RBMK reactors—and those reactors were Gorbachev’s pride. He wouldn’t kill her, she assured herself. Besides, if he did, it wouldn’t be like this. It would be with a bullet. This was too elaborate.
The front door wasn’t locked. Just before she opened it there was a flash. After that, the pain in her head was gone. Relief. She barreled through the entrance, aware of heat as it rolled over her like a wave. She spilled onto a bench. A black parka hung next to her. She put it on and slowly her body warmed. As her temperature rose, so did her terror. The smoke from the chimney meant someone was there, but it was too quiet. She peered down the hall and had the feeling that this complex was familiar, but she couldn’t place it. “Hello?” she called. Her voice shook from fear and cold, and only silence hit her back.
She pulled the parka tighter and that was when she realized it was wet. She looked at her charred hands. They were covered in blood. The parka she was wearing was soaked with it. So was a black uniform on the floor. She let out a scream. But again she was met only with silence. “Anyone?” she called.
She crept deeper into the building, down the hallway. The walls were covered in bright murals. Adrenaline had her mind working faster than her body, and as she stumbled through, she caught glimpses of the art, of what seemed to be three superwomen with capes and high boots.
In the kitchen, the table was toppled. Chairs were overturned. Anna grabbed a knife, held it up as best she could. That was when she recognized the lead-lined box from her laboratory flung into the corner, covered with warning stickers she had created. The box was made to hold pellets of enriched uranium oxide, the fuel used in the RBMK reactors.
She heard a moan. “Anna?”
Anna jumped back, stabbed the knife into the air in a wild gesture. She scanned the room, searched for a threat, for someone, tried to think who could do this. “Anna,” a woman’s voice said again, and Anna saw her, a stranger lying in a puddle of blood next to a picture window that looked out over the ice-covered mountains. She appeared to have been shot in the chest, to be bleeding out. Anna dropped to her knees at the woman’s side and tried to apply pressure with blood-soaked towels already next to her. It was all she knew to do.
“What happened? Is anyone else here?” Anna asked, frantic. She looked at the woman’s face, tried to place it, but she didn’t recognize her. “How did you know my name?” Blood gushed from the woman’s chest, spilled over Anna’s hands as she pressed harder to try to stop it. Her panic rose. Surely whoever did this would hunt Anna next.
“Why are we here?” Anna asked, and then saw two pendants around the stranger’s neck, golden bears. One bear was on its haunches, ready to fight. The other was on all fours, resting, at peace. She looked down at her own matching necklace dangling between them. Anna’s mother had given Anna the bears just before she was taken. They were unique, a wedding present to her own mother, and Anna had never seen those pendants anywhere else. “Where did you get that necklace?” Anna asked. “Who are you?”
“You gave it to me. Or you will.” The woman’s voice was a rasp. “Anna, we failed.”
“What are you talking about? What’s happening?”
“I’m Manya. Your daughter.”
Anna’s elbows buckled, her hands slipped, and she had to remind herself to keep pressure on the wound. Anna hadn’t seen her daughter since she was a baby. This had to be a cruel trick. Anna had spent years staring at any girl or woman who was the right age, sure that if they happened across each other, she would recognize her daughter. But this woman didn’t resemble who she imagined her Manya to be. Anna forced herself to look closer. She tried to find a trace of Yasha or of her own self in her features, her voice, but fear and panic made it impossible to see. “Manya?” A surge of sadness paralyzed Anna as she realized the irony of what might be unfolding, the idea that she might only see her daughter on the two ends of her life, as a baby and a corpse. Tears drenched her cheeks, fell on the woman and mixed with all that blood. “Are you really Manya?”
“You gave me the bears, said you would trust me if you saw them.” The woman’s voice was softer now. She didn’t have much time. “You said if I told you about the cake, your tenth birthday, you would know me.” A queasy sensation hit Anna when she heard the word cake. The woman was fading, paler even than she had been a minute earlier. “We’re running out of time. This is your first jump. Your amplifier, it pulled you through a ripple in space-time. It’s December 8, 1992.” The woman’s eyes fluttered. Anna shook her to keep her awake.
“Time travel? I actually did it?” Anna whispered. “This is 1992?”
“Yes, but we failed.” The woman gasped for air. “This is your station. The one you designed. Yasha built it. For you.”
It was beginning to make sense now, why it felt familiar.
“We failed. Again,” the woman whispered. “You have to try again. For Raisa. You promised to save Raisa.”
“Who is Raisa?”
“Your granddaughter.”
Anna shook her head. It was too much to take in and she was trying to parse facts from the emotions roiling through her, the fear and regret, sadness and confusion, making it hard to think clearly. The woman—her daughter, Manya, maybe—grabbed Anna’s hand. It was warm and slick, covered in blood.
“Chernobyl melted down. Reactor Number Four.” The woman’s voice was even weaker.
“It couldn’t melt down. I designed it. Oversaw the safety protocols myself,” Anna said.
“The impossible is always possible.” A ghost of a smile crossed the woman’s face. “You told me that.” And then, “The reaction caused the jump. We’re out of time.” She gasped. “Save Raisa. Remember you promised.” The woman struggled to hand Anna a worn photograph just as everything around Anna turned into static, as if she were watching television and the antenna needed to be adjusted. She was sucked into a place with no light at all. Her legs and arms lengthened and stretched. She was sure she was dying and she screamed because she couldn’t leave, not yet, only the sound was lost in the dark.
“Anna,” a voice said. Anna opened her eyes. Vera, her nurse, was standing over her, back in her cold, damp bedroom in Pripyat. Vera had been assigned to Anna seven years ago even though she didn’t need her. Young, dark-haired and all heart, Vera was more spy than attendant. The Soviets watched all their best scientists with nurses like Vera. “You screamed,” Vera said. “What are you wearing? What happened to your hands?”
Anna looked down to see that she was still wearing the parka from the mountain. She’d been too cold to take it off even if it was soaked in blood. She was holding the photograph in her burned, tortured hands, now blistered and bleeding.
“Can I help you take off your boots at least?”
“Leave me alone,” Anna said. “I tell you all the time, leave me be. I don’t need your help.” She turned away, reeling from the shock of what she’d just seen, to look at the old photograph. There in the picture was the family she hadn’t contacted in decades. Yulia and Lazar. They were older, but there was no question it was them. They stood in front of a store’s plate glass window. The woman from the mountain—Manya, yes, it had to be Manya, Anna decided—was next to them. She was smiling, holding a baby. Baby Raisa, Anna’s granddaughter. A date was scribbled in the bottom corner: 1971. Anna started rocking back and forth, tried to make sense of everything that was happening. Manya. The memory of the birthday cake and the bears, they were all real, proof—of what?
“The explosion, it was violent. It shook the building. Did you hit your head?” Vera asked, bringing Anna back. “At least let me bandage your hands.”
“What explosion?”
“Something happened at Chernobyl. There’s a terrible fire.”
“It melted down,” Anna said, remembering what Manya had predicted. Anna hadn’t believed her then. But now she looked toward the window and saw an eerie blue light streaming through the glass. She stumbled out of bed to take a closer look, and her foot crunched on something. It was the amplifier. It must have fallen from her pocket. The circuit board was charred. Anna ran her fingers over the melted diodes and capacitors. Her mind raced. Berlin. That was where she first thought about the theory of ripples in space-time—of time travel. Anna blinked and realized she believed that whatever had happened on the mountain was in the future. But Chernobyl was now. Anna was the chief engineer and those reactors were her responsibility. Instead of seeing the silhouette of illuminated towers, she saw a column of fire topped by a blue beam of light like a spike splitting the sky, and Anna knew this wasn’t just a fire. The reactor really was melting down just as Manya had told her it would. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people would die, and it was Anna’s fault.
“No, no!” Anna cried, feeling overwhelmed and terrified by the mountain and Manya, and now this. She leaned against the wall to steady herself. Crowds had formed in the courtyard below. All of Pripyat had come out. It looked like they were in the rain, but it wasn’t rain. It was radioactive ash coating the lawn, the streets and cars, and worst of all, the people. Children were laughing and dancing. They were playing in poison and no one was stopping them. Anna wanted to run outside and warn them, but it was too late. It had already been on their skin, sucked into their lungs. She knew these children, the crowds, they would all be dead within a week.
“What did I do?” Guilt and shame took hold, and then the phone rang and she knew exactly why, and what would happen next. All the blame and punishment would fall on her. Arrest, torture, death.
“No, she wasn’t at the lab. She didn’t do anything wrong,” Vera said into the receiver. Anna shoved clothing into a bag along with the singed amplifier. She was still holding that photograph of Manya, Raisa, Yulia, and Lazar.
Anna had only one option. It was a risk, but everything was a risk now. She had to go to that mountain, to the cosmic ray station she’d designed all those years ago, so she could go back in time and stop all of this, put the world back the way it should be.
PART I
If not now, when?
—Pirkei Avot
MOLLY
September 1961
Thirty-One Years Before Molly Dies on Mount Aragats
Philadelphia
It cost two hundred,” Papa said in his thick accent, waving his arm at the exhaust belching from the truck that had just pulled away. He pointed to the pile it had left behind: concrete blocks, mortar, wooden beams, and nails. Everything lay in a disjointed heap next to the back door of their butcher shop. Manya, though no one called her Manya anymore, stood next to him and her mother, staring at the delivery. She was ten years old and constantly frustrated by her parents’ choices, like this one, always trying to help them make better ones. It was why she had renamed herself Molly when she started kindergarten. Her parents, Yulia and Lazar, embraced this decision, praised her for it because Manya was Soviet, Molly was American, and while they didn’t agree on much, all three of them were eager to leave the USSR behind. Now her parents were convinced this pile of construction materials would help them live like real Americans, and Molly needed them to understand that was ridiculous.
She held up the issue of Life magazine that had inspired the purchase. The man on the cover wore something called a civilian fallout suit. She imagined him laughing at their family for buying all of this, the supplies Life said every household needed to build their personal shelter. Her parents read Life as a set of instructions on what Americans were supposed to think and do. Since Hires advertised on its pages, they bought the root beer. Same with Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Johnson & Johnson bandages, and General Electric’s television. And because the magazine said they were supposed to be scared of nuclear bombs, they were scared and preparing to survive—with the schematics from the latest issue.
“No one else in the United States is really doing this,” Molly said.
Mama stood with her arm around Molly’s shoulders. Molly wiggled for space, tired of Mama always being too close, but her mother only held her tighter. “Every American is doing this, or it wouldn’t be in the magazine,” Mama said.
“They’re not. It’s stupid.” Just saying the word stupid made Molly feel better, loosened the knot tied in her gut from the frustration with her parents, with this project. The shelter wouldn’t magically make them like everyone else. Anyway, she felt American. It was her parents and their bad ideas, like this one, that held them back.
“Two hundred, for this? For nothing.” Papa spat on the ground.
“It cost two hundred dollars,” Mama said in her perfect American accent, correcting his English. Mama was a linguist, and night after night, for years, she had tried to teach Papa so he could blend in like she did. Molly was embarrassed that he couldn’t do it, that kids at school laughed at him. “Lazar, add ‘dollars’ or ‘bucks.’ And don’t roll the r.”
“The door,” he said to Molly. She opened it and the hinge creaked. The rusted bell overhead rang. “It cost two hundred dollars,” he said, still with a thick accent. He picked up a concrete block from the pile and went inside. Mama followed, carrying a sack of mortar. A white cloud puffed around her from a hole in the bag.
“Can I go play now?” Molly asked. It was Saturday. The store was closed, and all the other kids would be in the park. It wasn’t fair that she couldn’t be outside with them, having fun. “Please?”
“No. Start carrying supplies down to the basement,” Papa called.
“Check the list,” Mama said at the same time, wanting Molly to compare the list of what they’d ordered to the actual materials dumped behind their store.
“American kids play at the park on Saturday,” Molly said. She let go of the handle, the door slammed, and that knot in her gut tightened again.
When Mama came back up from the basement, the fringes of her hair were dusted white with mortar. “It’s the sabbath and Yom Kippur. You’re not going anywhere,” she said to Molly.
“We don’t even go to synagogue. What does it matter?”
“We’re Jewish. It matters.” Mama kissed the top of Molly’s head.
“Stop touching me.”
“I can’t stop. I’m your mother. Now check the list. Make sure we weren’t cheated.”
“No one’s cheating us.” Molly groaned and looked back at the magazine. Across from the list was a drawing, a cutout of the finished shelter. It depicted two parents and two children inside. The little girl was brushing her straight hair. The father was lighting a cigarette and the mother was tucking the little boy into one of the bunk beds. The shelves were filled with canned goods and first-aid supplies. They were all smiling. It’s fake, Molly thought. No one stuck in that shelter would be happy while the world outside was melting. She knew it because she had seen pictures of what those bombs did.
Mama looked over Molly’s shoulder at the family in the drawing and her voice changed, fell. “The four of them look perfect. But they’re not real. Don’t believe in the glitz and polish.”
“I know, I know,” Molly said. She rolled her eyes, anticipating what was coming next.
“The veneer wears away, just—”
“Like it did in Berlin,” Molly said, finishing the sentence. Mama always talked about Berlin that way, told Molly that when she got there in 1937 it was a city filled with life and dreams, but when she left in 1941 it was a terrifying shell. And she warned it could happen to the United States, too. “If you don’t believe in this stupid picture, why are we building the shelter?”
“Because your father believes, and we do things for people we love.” She took a deep breath, started walking back inside with another sack. “Keep working.”
Work. It was the one thing her parents agreed on: Above all else, working hard was the way forward, no matter where you lived or what you wanted. It was why if Molly wasn’t at school, Mama watched her do homework or stationed her at the cash register, unless they needed her help with slaughtering and slicing. But kids in America played in the park on the weekend. They didn’t work. Building wasn’t what Molly was supposed to be doing, and now her stomach was so tight she needed water. A drink always helped.
She went inside to what Mama called their home but was really just a room in the back of their butcher shop, separated by a curtain and crammed with rosebushes Mama adored and Molly hated. Molly’s bed was stuffed in one corner and Mama and Papa’s bed was in the other. They had a small stove and a counter with a tiny half sink. Their sheets came from Sears because they advertised in Life. The walls were covered in posters from national parks like Yellowstone. She filled a glass, drank, and felt a little better. But she still thought she should not have to spend her weekends working, listening to her parents tugging one way and another. She took a deep breath and yelled down the basement stairs, “I’m going to the park.” Then she ran as fast as she could, shaking and thrilled that she was breaking their rules, crashing through the door so hard the bell clanged and shook. She heard Mama call after her, but by then Molly was too far away and she didn’t look back. They wouldn’t chase her or make a scene. They couldn’t risk it because they weren’t in America legally. They needed to hide in plain sight, her parents said, and in that moment, Molly loved taking advantage of it. She ran as fast as her saddle shoes would carry her, skirt flying and braids coming loose. It was a release to put space between her and that butcher shop. Every step loosened the pain.
They lived in a part of Northeast Philadelphia some called Little Russia, where all their neighbors were refuseniks like them, Soviet Jews forbidden to emigrate but who found a way to escape. No one knew who had legal papers and who didn’t, and no one asked. But instead of living like they were now free, Molly thought, they all lived like caged animals in a neighborhood that must be just like the one they left. Everyone spoke Russian and ate borscht and herring, slurped soup bones and marrow. The store signs were in Cyrillic. The bread at the bakery was dark and coarse and the dresses at Svetlana’s shop were thick and out of style. The baker called to Molly as she ran. So did the man who owned the shoe shop. They all knew her. Five blocks away, Little Russia collided with an Irish community, and the children all crashed into one another at school and at the park. Bigger kids had tight-knit groups defined by their roots. Smaller kids, like Molly, didn’t care. Her best friend, Catherine, was as Irish as could be, and they laughed at the fact that they both had blond hair and blue eyes.
The park had a chain-link fence around one side. Molly ran her hands along the steel, still shaking from the thrill of disobeying her parents. She hurried past older boys playing basketball and the girls standing in circles. She went straight for the swings.
“Hey,” she said to Catherine, who was already there. Molly started pumping her legs.
“Freak,” Catherine replied. Her pigtails bobbed.
“I know you are but what am I?” Molly stuck her tongue out and they both giggled.
“Did you tell your mom your birthday cupcakes you brought to school yesterday were weird?” Mama used Soviet flour, which felt like grit. She bought it from the baker across the street because it was cheaper. She said no one would taste the difference, but the cupcakes tasted like they had been rolled in sand and everyone spat them out.
“I liked them,” Molly lied.
They played tag and climbed on the jungle gym, skipped through hopscotch and double Dutch with other girls. By the time Molly left it was starting to get dark, and she walked home slowly, thinking about how angry her parents were going to be. They had no right to be mad, she told herself. She was sure that the kids in Life, the ones pictured in the shelter, if they had been real, wouldn’t have helped their parents build it. They probably would have gone out and played baseball or biked around while their father hammered it together and their mother baked cookies. Why did Mama even mention Yom Kippur? Americans celebrated Christmas. If Molly’s parents wanted a real American family, they should have let her play like a normal kid, forget about being Jewish.
Across the street from their store, she saw the baker lugging a box out to the corner. It looked heavy and he called her over, asked for help. “Thank you,” he said when Molly grabbed one end. He grunted and they eased the damp, warped box to the ground.
“What is it?” Molly asked.
Genre:
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“One of the many wonderful things about Atomic Anna, a book about Chernobyl, yes, but also about comic books, the power of math, finding one’s truth, and love, both biological and found, is the core group of women who ground it… The novel is masterfully plotted.”
—New York Times Book Review -
“A story of three generations of women and the secret history that binds them, Rachel Barenbaum’s ambitious second novel Atomic Anna moves seamlessly through time and space, from the Russian Revolution to late-20th-century Philadelphia. It’s propulsive and intimate and surprisingly relevant to these past two years, when time has so often felt sharp and amorphous all at once.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books -
“With Atomic Anna, Barenbaum has created a saga that manages to be both sweeping and riveting… Even without the dazzling time travel, these characters and storylines would be compelling. With it, they are transfixing.”
—WBUR Arts & Culture -
“Just as the romance of epic literature is timeless, Atomic Anna’s demonstration of what may be learned about the human heart is also outside of time, and certainly beyond the ordinary.”
—BookPage -
“This novel is about the impact that small decisions can have on the lives of many, how one decision, conversation, or action can have a ripple effect and impact generations… Traveling across time, readers experience the connectedness of the women in Anna’s life and how their knowledge, love, and collaboration are their superpowers.”
—Jewish Book Council -
"Barenbaum burnishes her reputation as an up-and-coming talent with this audacious time travel story... The threads build toward a deeply satisfying denouement, and the author uses the sci-fi plot device to explore parent-child relationships and questions about the morality of changing the past. Barenbaum dares greatly, and succeeds."
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) -
“In Barenbaum’s skillful hands, a complex concept and structure work beautifully. The book is an incredible achievement with a heartfelt human theme… As ambitious as a Greek tragedy and just as lyrical and unflinching.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review) -
“Atomic Anna is an epic adventure, telling us about three generations of Jewish women working together and traveling through time to prevent the Chernobyl disaster and right the wrongs of their past. Their brilliance and determination raises the question: Just because you can change the past, does it mean you should?”
—Good Day Sacramento -
“A tour de force on an epic scale.”
—Lilith -
“Atomic Anna is a dazzling work of ingenuity and imagination.”
—Téa Obreht, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Inland -
"A novel of love, suspense, and nuclear technology. Breathtaking."
—Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends -
“Deftly plotted and thrillingly paced, Atomic Anna combines unforgettable characters, historical intrigue, and time travel in a remarkable tour de force that shines a new light on an old story. If you’re looking to be transported, this book is for you.”
—Anna Solomon, author of The Book of V. -
“Epic, ambitious, and gripping, Atomic Anna is a wildly inventive novel that teems with life and grapples with the big questions of science, art, love, and humanity. Rachel Barenbaum is a propulsive writer who takes readers on a journey through time via the lives of three generations of extraordinary women who come together to try to change the course of history and undo the mistakes of their past. Atomic Anna is a trip through time well worth taking. I couldn't put it down.”
—Lara Prescott, New York Times bestselling author of The Secrets We Kept -
“The only thing I love more than nuclear physics, time travel, comic books and stories with a decided Russia accent, is Barenbaum’s latest splendid novel, a multi-generational tale with strong, passionate female leads. Brilliantly written, it truly makes you believe in the mysteries of both the universe, time, and the human heart.”
—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and With or Without You -
“Rachel Barenbaum is a fiercely talented writer whose latest novel took my breath away. Steeped in the history of the nuclear age, Atomic Anna is a thrilling multigenerational epic that leaps through time and across continents to detail the troubled lives and rich inner worlds of an unforgettable cast of characters. An electrifying novel that holds you in its grip from start to finish, this is one you don’t want to miss.”
—Lauren Wilkinson, author of American Spy
- On Sale
- Mar 7, 2023
- Page Count
- 464 pages
- Publisher
- Grand Central Publishing
- ISBN-13
- 9781538734872
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