The Vanishing Sky
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3.4 • 8 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Warlight and The Invisible Bridge, an intimate, harrowing story about a family of German citizens during World War II.
Included in the New York Times Book Review's Summer Reading Guide for Historical Fiction
"There was no shelter without her sons."
In 1945, as the war in Germany nears its violent end, the Huber family is not yet free of its dangers or its insidious demands. Etta, a mother from a small, rural town, has two sons serving their home country: her elder, Max, on the Eastern front, and her younger, Georg, at a school for Hitler Youth. When Max returns from the front, Etta quickly realizes that something is not right-he is thin, almost ghostly, and behaving very strangely. Etta strives to protect him from the Nazi rule, even as her husband, Josef, becomes more nationalistic and impervious to Max's condition. Meanwhile, miles away, her younger son Georg has taken his fate into his own hands, deserting his young class of battle-bound soldiers to set off on a long and perilous journey home.
The Vanishing Sky is a World War II novel as seen through a German lens, a story of the irreparable damage of war on the home front, and one family's participation-involuntary, unseen, or direct-in a dangerous regime. Drawing inspiration from her own father's time in the Hitler Youth, L. Annette Binder has crafted a spellbinding novel about the choices we make for country and for family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Binder's debut novel (after the collection Rise) follows Etta and Josef Huber and their sons Max and Georg in rural Germany during WWII. Before Georg, a bookish 15-year-old, is sent to a Hitler Youth academy, he secretly watches a Roma camp by the river, hoping in vain that the women's dancing will spark the socially acceptable carnal desire for the opposite sex that he knows his strict and punitive father expects of him. (Meanwhile, Georg would rather be studying Greek and Latin than join with the fascists.) Binder then alternates between Georg's life at the academy, where he sees the damage suffered by bombing victims and wishes he could go home like them; and Max returned from the front, tormented by headaches and emotionally shattered. After Georg kisses a boy he'd befriended, he sets out alone for home. Binder, who left Germany for the U.S. as a child, based her book partly on her father's experiences in the Hitler Youth organization and on her paternal grandfather's journals from between the wars, and describes the war's toll on German soldiers and civilians while lingering on an eerie, subtle irony in descriptions of Jews, Roma, gays, and people with mental illnesses, whose dire circumstances their neighbors were blissfully unaware of. This provides a fresh take on the madness of war.
