Hannah's War

by Jan Eliasberg

Overview

A "mesmerizing" re-imagination of the final months of World War II (Kate Quinn, author of The Alice Network), Hannah's War is an unforgettable love story about an exceptional woman and the dangerous power of her greatest discovery.
Berlin, 1938. Groundbreaking physicist Dr. Hannah Weiss is on the verge of the greatest discovery of the 20th century: splitting the atom. She understands that the energy released by her discovery can power entire cities or destroy them. Hannah believes the weapon's creation will secure an end to future wars, but as a Jewish woman living under the harsh rule of the Third Reich, her research is belittled, overlooked, and eventually stolen by her German colleagues. Faced with an impossible choice, Hannah must decide what she is willing to sacrifice in pursuit of science's greatest achievement.
New Mexico, 1945. Returning wounded and battered from the liberation of Paris, Major Jack Delaney arrives in the New Mexican desert with a mission: to catch a spy. Someone in the top-secret nuclear lab at Los Alamos has been leaking encoded equations to Hitler's scientists. Chief among Jack's suspects is the brilliant and mysterious Hannah Weiss, an exiled physicist lending her talent to J. Robert Oppenheimer's mission. All signs point to Hannah as the traitor, but over three days of interrogation that separate her lies from the truth, Jack will realize they have more in common than either one bargained for.
Hannah's War is a thrilling wartime story of loyalty, truth, and the unforeseeable fallout of a single choice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316537452
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	03/03/2020
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	27,091
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Jan Eliasberg is an award-winning writer/director. Her prolific directing career includes dramatic pilots for CBS, NBC, and ABC, such as Miami Vice and Wiseguy; countless episodes of television series, including Bull, Nashville, Parenthood, The Magicians, Blue Bloods, NCIS: Los Angeles, Supernatural, and dozens of others; as well as the feature film Past Midnight, starring Paul Giamatti, the late Natasha Richardson, and Rutger Hauer.
Eliasberg also has a storied career as a screenwriter, writing films driven by strong female leads, including Fly Girls about the Women Air Service Pilots in WWII for Nicole Kidman and Cameron Diaz at FOX 2000, among many others.

Editorial Reviews

01/27/2020

Eliasberg’s fast-paced, insightful debut explores one woman’s anxiety about helping to create the world’s first nuclear weapon. Dr. Hannah Weiss, a Jew who escaped Nazi Germany, works with the Americans on the atom bomb in 1945 Los Alamos, N.Mex., where, thanks to her exceptional talent and stable personality, she fends off men’s flirtations and chauvinistic assumptions. Hannah is alternately excited by the work and sobered by its implications, feeling a “frisson of energy and enormity up and down her arms and neck” while testing a reactor. Meanwhile, Hannah’s colleagues circulate a petition about their concerns over the dangerous weapon, causing military intelligence to open an investigation into possible subversives on the team. The lead investigator, Maj. Jack Delaney, wants to know whether Hannah is actually spying for a Nazi physicist, but Jack’s attraction to Hannah’s “starchy self-determination” distracts him from the interrogation process as Hannah gains the upper hand, and suspicions, second-guessing, and simmering desire ensue between them. Clever phrasing and keenly developed characters add substance to the intrigue. Eliasberg’s triumphant tale of Hannah transcending anti-Semitism and the pitfalls of workplace romance will satisfy readers. Agent: Adriann Zurhellen, Foundry Literary + Media, LLC. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"A deft fusion of espionage, science, military history and two wounded human hearts, Hannah's War is an amazing and distinctive novel that reimagines the forgotten woman behind one of history's most overlooked and (literally) world-shaking discoveries."—The Day

"Jan Eliasberg knows how to open big with strong suspense and wry humor and take us for a hurtling ride through one of America's most complex moments. The wonderful characters of Hannah's War bring together a moving love story, a high-stakes mystery and a fascinating look into the moral compass of an exceptional woman."—Amy Bloom, author of White Houses

"Eliasberg moves effortlessly between Hannah's past and present to deliver a historical love story full of intrigue and suspense. Hannah's War shines a much-needed light on one of the most influential women in history."—Booklist

"An exhilarating war thriller, Hannah's War moves at breakneck pace between 1930s Berlin and 1940s New Mexico. A paean to Lise Meitner, it is the compelling portrait of a woman who combined a lively scientific curiosity with an impassioned personal ethic."—Historical Novels Review

"Hannah's War is a gripping cat-and-mouse tale of love, war, deception, and espionage you won't be able to put down. Jan Eliasberg elevates the spy thriller with her clear, fierce admiration for the women of the past who refused to be edged out of the world of scientific discovery. Mesmerizing."—Kate Quinn, author of The Alice Network

"I flew through Hannah's War, a gripping true story long overdue to be told, of a brilliant woman physicist working to develop the first atomic bomb and the secret she fights to protect."—Martha Hall Kelly, author of Lilac Girls

"At the center of this novel you will find love and physics entangled together in the life of a heroic woman whose bravery and brilliance helped to change the course of modern history. Jan Eliasberg's extraordinary novel is a fictionalized version of what really happened, and despite its serious subject matter, the story moves forward with great speed and power, giving off both heat and light. This is a great story about a woman of genius."—Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love

From the Publisher

Orlagh Cassidy eloquently narrates this fictional account of a WWII-era physicist who is working on the atom bomb in Los Alamos while yearning for the love of her life in Berlin. Anticipating persecution as a Jew, Hannah escapes Germany and continues her work on the atom with the Americans in New Mexico. Portraying Hannah with a gentle Austrian accent, Cassidy captures the character’s feminine beauty and scientific acuity. Major Jack Delaney is dispatched to Los Alamos to investigate suspicions that Hannah’s loyalties may still lie with the Third Reich scientists she abandoned. Cassidy does well with the extended dialogues between Hannah and Jack. The more he is determined to ferret out Hannah’s secrets, the more her revelations become both shrewd and mesmerizing. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2020 - AudioFile

Orlagh Cassidy eloquently narrates this fictional account of a WWII-era physicist who is working on the atom bomb in Los Alamos while yearning for the love of her life in Berlin. Anticipating persecution as a Jew, Hannah escapes Germany and continues her work on the atom with the Americans in New Mexico. Portraying Hannah with a gentle Austrian accent, Cassidy captures the character’s feminine beauty and scientific acuity. Major Jack Delaney is dispatched to Los Alamos to investigate suspicions that Hannah’s loyalties may still lie with the Third Reich scientists she abandoned. Cassidy does well with the extended dialogues between Hannah and Jack. The more he is determined to ferret out Hannah’s secrets, the more her revelations become both shrewd and mesmerizing. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2020 - AudioFile

2020-01-13
A Jewish nuclear physicist is accused of spying while working on the nuclear bomb in Los Alamos.

During the waning months of World War II, the Americans and Germans are in a race to develop nuclear weapons; whoever wins, wins the world. Many refugee European scientists are working for the U.S. nuclear effort, headed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Among these refugees is Dr. Hannah Weiss, loosely based on Dr. Lise Meitner, the unsung physicist who discovered nuclear fission. Maj. Jack Delaney has come to Los Alamos to interrogate Hannah, suspected of being a Nazi mole. His suspicions are founded on a telegram she may have attempted to send overseas and a packet of postcards gleaned from a search of her room. Flashbacks to 1938 Berlin are interspersed throughout. Hannah, a brilliant scientist, is relegated to a basement lab of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and treated as a "Jewish slave." Her work on atom splitting is so valuable to the Reich, however, that what remains of her family—her Uncle Joshua and niece Sabine—have so far escaped the worst impacts of Nazi persecution. Her colleague Stefan, whose playboy charm Hannah tries to resist, takes credit for her work. But Stefan will eventually help Sabine, and then Hannah, escape Germany, and love overcomes her distrust. But should it? Screenwriter and TV director Eliasberg's first novel effectively evokes the atmosphere; descriptions of setting are never merely ornamental. However, her characters lack interiority. Jack never quite transcends the stereotype of the hard-boiled detective with inner wounds to match his external ones: A bullet he took during the liberation of Paris is still lodged near his spine. Hannah is the beautiful ice queen who conceals a molten core of passion. Far from delivering the intended frisson of growing attraction, Jack and Hannah's verbal sparring is too often verbose and didactic. The characters are so one-dimensional that readers won't particularly care which side they're on.

A flawed novel which could, with the right cast to lend emotional depth, make very good TV.

Kirkus Reviews