New Article in The Day: Novelist Jan Eliasberg reimagines amazing story of female physicist and the atomic bomb

Novelists are routinely inspired by big moments and charismatic figures from history. But a brief allusion to an anonymous person in a 75-year-old newspaper article? Not so much. And yet Jan Eliasberg, an award-winning screenwriter and director of film and television, was perusing microfilm in the New York Public Library and came across an issue…

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Review From Shelf Awareness

As World War II rages on, an international team of brilliant scientists is developing a top-secret bomb in the lab at Los Alamos. Among them is Dr. Hannah Weiss, a gifted Jewish physicist who fled Berlin to escape Nazi persecution. Major Jack Delaney, an intelligence agent sent to Los Alamos to catch a spy, has…

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Review From Historical Novel Society

1938. Can the woman scientist, whose research laid the groundwork for the invention of the atom bomb, save the world from destruction? In the employ of a genocidal country, Austrian-born, Jewish scientist Dr. Hannah Weiss has to stand by while her colleagues at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin purloin her most vital pioneering discovery…

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“…a deeply affecting emotional tale”

“That a novel that deals fluently with physics, espionage, and Jewish tragedy can also become a deeply affecting emotional tale – with a transcendent, redemptive vision of love – is a tribute to its hugely gifted author.” –Jewish Book Council

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REVIEW FROM BOOKLIST

Award-winning writer-director Eliasberg’s first novel was inspired by an unnamed female physicist, mentioned in a New York Times article from the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Based on the real woman who discovered nuclear fission, it tells the story of what her life might have been. In 1945, Austrian physicist Hannah Weiss…

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