Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

"Oh Pure and Radiant Heart imagines a world in which the three geniuses who were key to the invention of the atom bomb - physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard - are displaced to contemporary America at the moment history's first mushroom cloud rises over the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945." "When Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Szilard appear in Santa Fe in 2003, Ann, a reference librarian, and her doting gardener husband, Ben, take them in. With the long-dead scientists for houseguests, Ann and Ben are swept up in a quixotic and calamitous quest that takes them from Ground Zero in Hiroshima to the Nevada Test Site to the United Nations on a ramshackle pilgrimage for nuclear disarmament. As the scientists, faced with the evidence of their nuclear legacy, cross the United States - bankrolled by an earnest, pot-smoking Tokyo millionaire - they attract a growing convoy of RVs carrying groupies, drifters, activists, former Deadheads, New Age freeloaders, and religious fanatics who believe Oppenheimer is the Second Coming. Meanwhile Ann and Ben fight to save their marriage, gravely threatened by her obsessive devotion to the ghostly men of the Manhattan Project."--BOOK JACKET.

Born in Boston in 1968; moved to Toronto, Canada with her Egyptologist father and teacher/librarian mother two years later. Lived in Los Angeles (91-94), where she worked as a copy editor at Larry Flynt Publications (of Hustler for 2 years; also Busty Beauties, S.W.A.T. (a gun magazine) and Fighting Knives: America's Most Incisive Cutlery Publication. Got a Master's in environmental policy at Duke University. Moved to New York in 1996, where she worked as a fundraiser for the Natural Resources Defense Council; then went freelance and moved to Tucson, where she now lives and writes full-time on an isolated spread in the desert, in 1999 Spends summers in Anchorage, Alaska. Contributed a number of personal essays to anthologies over the past several years, some still forthcoming, including one about fairytales, one about Star Wars ('03), one about literary books ('04), GIVE OUR REGARDS TO THE ATOMSMASHERS! (Pantheon, 2004), one about the environmental movement ('04), one about lost friendships ('05).