Bøker av Roberta Silman

After a chance meeting in 1981, Lily Fialka confronts the defining time of her life: 1943–45 in Los Alamos, when her physicist husband, Peter, worked on the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project—a time of isolation, hard work, temptation, and loneliness, yet exhilaration and triumph; when great breakthroughs were made, but lives felt narrow; when loyalty was paramount, but the need for secrecy created unbearable tension. At the same time, Lily and her friends are haunted by what is happening to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Resistance in Germany, and his story serves as a counterpoint to theirs. In a sweeping historical novel that cuts across continents and reveals a deep knowledge of the science of the making of the bomb, Beginning the World Again offers valuable insights into that fascinating time.

Pregnant with her first child, Diny Branson is haunted by her mother's death years ago in the Hudson River. Was it suicide or accident? Slowly, Diny weaves the many threads of Lise's tragic life-from a fairyland youth to a happy marriage, then through the travails of losing a child. Diny learns how the forces of history, like the coming Holocaust, inflict losses, such as loss of language, that create other more subtle losses-and how the forces of nature, like the majestic Hudson, can be both threat and comfort.

Are there really second chances? It is the 1970s and Mady Glazer is trying to hold herself and her three children together after the shocking death of her charismatic husband, David, in a plane crash. When they finally go on vacation to Racer's Cove at the eastern end of Long Island, they meet Hans Panneman, a bachelor and potter, who was brought up in Africa, whose father was an avid Nazi, and who escaped his earlier life by settling here and leading the quietest of lives. They could not be more different, more representative of "the other," as Mady is reminded by her extended Jewish family when she finds herself drawn to this quiet, puzzling man. Yet, love and ease sometimes come where we least expect them.