Beginning the World Again

Roberta Silman’s first story was in The New Yorker; other stories followed there, in The Atlantic, Redbook, McCall’s, Hadassah, VQR, The American Scholar and in many places here and abroad. Her books are Blood Relations, stories; three novels, Boundaries, The Dream Dredger, and Beginning the World Again: A Novel of Los Alamos; and two children’s books, Somebody Else’s Child and The Astronomers.   Born in Brooklyn, brought up on Long Island, Silman graduated with honors from Cornell University and has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence.   A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, she has won the National Magazine Award for Fiction twice. Two stories were read on Selected Shorts, two others won PEN Syndicated Fiction prizes, and several were cited in Best American Short Stories. Somebody Else’s Child won the Child Study Association Award; Blood Relations won honorable mentions for the PEN Hemingway and Janet Heidinger Kafka Prizes; Boundaries won honorable mention for the Kafka Prize; and The Dream Dredger and Beginning the World Again won Washington Irving Awards. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, VQR, The American Scholar, and World Books PRI. She reviews regularly for the online magazine The ArtsFuse.   Ms. Silman is married to structural engineer, Robert Silman, and they have three married children and five grandchildren.

After a chance meeting in 1981, Lily Fialka confronts the defining time of her life: 1943–45 in Los Alamos, when her physicist husband, Peter, worked on the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project—a time of isolation, hard work, temptation, and loneliness, yet exhilaration and triumph; when great breakthroughs were made, but lives felt narrow; when loyalty was paramount, but the need for secrecy created unbearable tension. At the same time, Lily and her friends are haunted by what is happening to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Resistance in Germany, and his story serves as a counterpoint to theirs. In a sweeping historical novel that cuts across continents and reveals a deep knowledge of the science of the making of the bomb, Beginning the World Again offers valuable insights into that fascinating time.