The Ash Garden

by Dennis Bock

Nominated by

• Vancouver Public Library, Vancouver, Canada
• Bergen Public Library, Bergen, Norway
  

A scientist stealing across the Pyrenees into Spain, then smuggled into America…. a young woman fleeing the Nazis and quarantined on a ship wandering the Atlantic…. A girl playing on a riverbank as a solitary airplane appears on the horizon and flies towards her city….The lives of these three people are about to change beyond reckoning, their destinies shaped by one horrific event. For that scientist was headed for the desert of Los Alamos, that young woman, for a refugee camp outside Quebec City, and the Japanese girl at Ground Zero, for a life beyond imagining.

When the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima on August 6 1945, the world changed in a few terrible minutes. The Ash Garden is an intricate and intense exploration of the reverbations from that single moment of mass destruction. Sweeping from Germany to America to Japan, From New York City tenements to a small Ontario town, it weaves together the destinies of three people whose lives are caught up in war and its aftermath.

Anton, the brilliant German scientist, is sure of his role in history. His orphaned part-Jewish wife, Sophie, must now find a way to redefine herself. And Emiko, the young Japanese girl, faces a lifetime of suffering, psychic pain and questions, so many questions. As their fates triangulate, the true implications of a nightmare that has lasted for over a half a century are revealed.