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The Vanishing Sky
- Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
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The Vanishing Sky
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Summary
Bloomsbury presents The Vanishing Sky by L. Annette Binder, read by Laurel Lefkow.
A story of the shattering impact of war on one German family, The Vanishing Sky is a deeply moving portrait of why decent, caring people falter when confronted by evil.
They've wrecked the world, these men, and still they're not done. They'd take the sky if they could.
Germany, 1945, and the bombs are falling. In Heidenfeld, Etta and her husband, Josef, roam an empty nest: their eldest son, Max, is fighting on the front lines, while 15-year-old Georg has swapped books for guns at a Nürnberg school for the Hitler Youth. At home, news of the war provokes daily doses of fear as the planes grow closer, taking one city after the next.
When Max is unexpectedly discharged, Etta is relieved to have her eldest home and safe. But soon after he arrives, it’s clear that the boy who left is not the same returned.
With Georg a hundred miles away and a husband confronting his own difficult feelings toward patriotic duty, Etta alone must gather the pieces of a splintering family, determined to hold them together in the face of an uncertain future.
Critic reviews
"A Time to Love and a Time to Die by Erich Maria Remarque has always been one of my favourite books, and Reunion by Fred Uhlman I consider a masterpiece, so it was with great pleasure that I read The Vanishing Sky, which told the same story from a completely different angle." (Jeffrey Archer)
"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)