The Vanishing Sky

by L. Annette Binder

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635574678
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	07/21/2020
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	20,694
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

L. Annette Binder was born in Germany and immigrated to the U.S. as a small child. She holds degrees in classics and law from Harvard, an MA in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley, and an MFA from the Program in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Her short fiction collection Rise received the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. She lives in New Hampshire.

Editorial Reviews

04/27/2020

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. (June)

Publishers Weekly

2020-04-13
A rural German family faces the end of World War II and all its dangers.

The war is racing toward its conclusion in Germany, but the danger for the rural Huber family is far from over. Aside from suffering the daily hardships—finding food in the shops is a struggle, for example—Etta Huber fears for the safety of her sons. Max, the elder, has mysteriously returned home from the front, but he’s unreachable, barely himself, altered forever by what he has witnessed. His 15-year-old brother, Georg, is at a school for Hitler Youth, drilling in preparation for the hopeless and final burst of fighting to come. Meanwhile, Etta’s husband, Josef, grows more distant and nationalistic; he wants to fight for German pride, too. Then Max disappears, and Georg flees from his school, an act for which he could be hanged, and the novel shifts into an increasingly dizzying nightmare until its harrowing conclusion. Binder provides a family’s-eye view of the terror and trauma, offering readers a unique perspective on the war. The narration closely follows Etta and Georg in turns, delivering the details of privation and fear as well as surprising moments of kinship and generosity with an unforgettable grace. “They planted boys in the stony fields and up along the hills,” Georg observes. “They planted them, and crosses grew.” The future is unimaginable, Binder writes—and yet, somehow, those who are left will find a way to carry on.

A masterful story of war, horror, and love.

Kirkus Reviews

The Vanishing Sky paints a haunting portrait of a nation slowly collapsing. The story is gripping, and the characters are fully realized, flawed individuals.” —New York Journal of Books

“The Vanishing Sky is a heartrending and blazingly lucid depiction of Nazi Germany as not a simple monolith of evil but as an oppressive, fanatical political regime that was encountered, accommodated, rejected, and survived by ordinary people, people just like you and me.” —Miriam Toews, author of WOMEN TALKING

“A hugely ambitious novel whose consummate, patient artistry is moving beyond measure.” —Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of WE ARE NOT OURSELVES

“The Vanishing Sky is so fiercely imagined, so wondrously conjured, that what you hold not only pulls you into its history but into a world of pure yearning, determination, struggle, and hope.” —Paul Yoon, author of THE MOUNTAIN

“[Binder] uses Etta Huber, a hausfrau in a rural village, as a means of feeling her way back into the past, channeling the anguish and uncertainty of the final months of the fighting.” —New York Times Book Review

“A heartbreaking portrait of an ordinary family shattered by a war they didn't want.” —The Times

“An intimate tragedy that's all the more powerful for refusing the ending we fervently hope for.” —The Daily Mail

“At a moment when American readers uneasily watch our own leaders stoke ethnic and religious tensions - often to tragic ends - in a way that we have not quite seen before in our lifetimes, the Hubers' story feels particularly revelatory. . . Binder is a deft writer with a gift for choosing vocabulary that elevates the observations of normal people into carefully rendered art. . . The Vanishing Sky tells a tragic story, but it also serves as a meditation on tragedy and the everyday cruelty by which tragedy is so often begotten.” —The Washington Independent Review of Books

“The Vanishing Sky reveals the German home front as I've never seen it in fiction... Binder tells her story patiently, like an artist placing tiny pieces into a mosaic; this literary novel isn't one to race through. But I find it gripping, powerful, and a brave narrative, unsparing in its honesty.” —Historical Novels Review

“A masterful story of war, horror, and love...Binder provides a family's-eye view of the terror and trauma, offering readers a unique perspective on the war.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A fresh take on the madness of war.” —Publishers Weekly

“This stark accounting of the personal damage inflicted by war draws its power from its homey details, as one family's life is blown apart.” —Booklist

“L. Annette Binder's sad, intimate first novel, The Vanishing Sky, conveys a sense of Germany at the tail end of World War II, as seen primarily through the experiences of one family from Heidenfeld, near the city of Würzburg. . . Georg, a pudgy, bookish youngster who's ill-equipped for fighting...is the book's Odysseus, his mother its Penelope. Binder creates a believable, lost world with Etta and Georg. The ending is inevitable, and we are left with an overriding-and poignant-sense of loss.” —Bookpage

“An empathic, portrayal of the human cost of war, delivered as an inside view of a family living under the Nazi regime.” —Sydney Morning Herald

“Eloquent, and painfully human.” —Irish Examiner

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