Publishers Weekly
08/19/2024
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.)
From the Publisher
Praise for The Sound of a Thousand Stars:
“Robbins explores ambition, love, and nuclear destruction in her introspective latest . . . Readers will be riveted.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Because The Sound of a Thousand Stars is a novel of Los Alamos and its consequences, Niels Bohr is here, and Richard Feynman, and of course Robert Oppenheimer, to name a few. But even more gripping than her vivid depiction of these titans of physics is Rachel Robbins’s rendering of Alice and Caleb, two bright young protagonists whose riveting story shows that love and destiny are forces just as powerful as faith or science.”
—Kathleen Rooney, author of From Dust to Stardust and Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
“From its first page, this novel delivers a keenly intimate, precise account of a watershed moment in our world history. Not only is The Sound of a Thousand Stars a great achievement of historical depth, it proves how selfless and vital love becomes when we find ourselves at the end of the world. Robbins has given us an elegy that rings clear, strong, and true.”
—Amy Jo Burns, author of Mercury
“The Sound of A Thousand Stars declassifies the human emotions at the core of one of the 20th century’s most fraught scientific projects. Asking questions of complicity and sacrifice that reverberate today, this beautifully written novel considers the costs of scientific advancement, the value of an individual life, and the thrilling knife’s edge of being in love. A feat of a book.”
—Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House and Maddalena and the Dark
“In her marvelous debut, Rachel Robbins weaves an intimate and stirring story of love, sacrifice, and duty against the backdrop of one of humanity's most consequential undertakings — the Manhattan Project. Meticulously researched and beautifully rendered, The Sound of a Thousand Stars reminds us that the greatest mysteries are those of the human heart. This book will leave you breathless.”
—Soon Wiley, author of When We Fell Apart
“In her luminous debut novel, Robbins reminds us that history is written by people whose names we rarely remember—people who toil away in obscurity, carving out lives of wonder despite the odds and the dangers they face. This book is a soaring testament to all those unseen souls who answered history's call and selflessly sacrificed in order to shape the world in which we live.”
—Giano Cromley, author of The Last Good Halloween and American Mythology
