"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
"In her intimate and epic debut novel, L Annette Binder lifts the lid on one family’s darkest story to offer vital insight into daily life under the last days of the Third Reich. 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
"The challenge in humanizing the Western world’s most tortured history proves no match for Binder’s intellect, compassion, and unflinching gaze; one gets the feeling this writer, in the stunning precision of her painterly details, would prove virtuosic with any material she was handed to use. A hugely ambitious novel whose consummate, patient artistry is moving beyond measure." - Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of WE ARE NOT OURSELVES
"L. Annette Binder’s 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. This is a story—in all its rich layers—that dazzles, breaks your heart, clutches you, and gets you back up again. I’m grateful to have experienced it, and grateful to Binder for the gift she has given us." - 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
"Heartwarming and exciting...this book along with movies such as Hitler’s SS, A Portrait of Evil, and JoJo Rabbit explain how the strands of hatred reached out and entrapped whole families in a web of evil." - Jerusalem Post
"The Vanishing Sky is a powerful look at the capacity for evil that humans are capable of. It is an account of the effect one resolute generation’s self-imposed “amnesia” can have on the next .. [T]here is not one false note. The Vanishing Sky is fully controlled storytelling that avoids cliché, even as its winter turns into spring, even as it recounts the final days of a war still being fought by those who barely understand why." - Anniston Star
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.
