Vanishing Sky

‘A heartbreaking portrait of an ordinary family shattered by a war they didn’t want’ The TimesThey've wrecked the world, these men, and still they're not done. They'd take the sky if they could.Germany, 1945, and the bombs are falling. In Heidenfeld, Etta and her husband Josef roam an empty nest: their eldest son Max is fighting on the frontlines, while fifteen-year-old Georg has swapped books for guns at a Nürnberg school for the Hitler Youth. At home, news of the war provokes daily doses of fear as the planes grow closer, taking one city after the next.When Max is unexpectedly discharged, Etta is relieved to have her eldest home and safe. But soon after he arrives, it’s clear that the boy who left is not the same returned. With Georg a hundred miles away and a husband confronting his own difficult feelings toward patriotic duty, Etta alone must gather the pieces of a splintering family, determined to hold them together in the face of an uncertain future.

Binder was born in Germany herself and evokes great sympathy for Etta and her painfully fractured family, while opening up unusual angles on the terrible conflict. Written in purposefully even prose that is nonetheless harrowing, it’s an intimate tragedy that’s all the more powerful for refusing the ending we fervently hope for, A moving tale of a family destroyed by war . . . Inspired by her family's history, Binder unfolds a harrowing tale in limpid, expressive prose, Binder’s debut explores familiar territory from a fresh perspective. The result is an engrossing novel peopled by believable and sympathetic characters, Achingly beautiful . . . Binder's work is subtle and compassionate yet also clear and devastating in its depiction of a nation - and its people - suffocating under the weight of an insidious and inhuman ideology, one that ultimately devastates those who believe its illusions. Enduringly relevant, Eloquent, and painfully human

L. Annette Binder was born in Germany and moved to the US as a child. Her short fiction collection Rise received the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and her fiction has also appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among others. The Vanishing Sky is her first novel and is inspired by her family’s experience in Second World War Germany. She lives in New England.

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