The Ash Garden

The Ash Garden

Dennis Bock

#3200 of 8,085 books · #480 in Historical Fiction

Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award (2003).

A scientist stealing across the Pyrenees into Spain, then smuggled into America. A young woman quarantined on a ship wandering the Atlantic, her family stranded in Austria. A girl playing on a riverbank as a solitary airplane appears on the horizon. Lives already in motion, unsettled by war, and about to change beyond reckoning—their pasts blurred and their destinies at once defined and distorted by an inconceivable event. For that man was bound for the desert of Los Alamos, the woman unexpectedly en route to a refugee camp, the girl at Ground Zero and that plane the Enola Gay. In August of 1945, in a blinding flash, Hiroshima sees the dawning of the modern age.