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Average Rating:  out of 16 Reviews
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Price: $13.95
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Sale: $6.99
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Manufacturer: Vintage
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EAN (European Article Number): 9780307277558
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Nora Gallagher
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Publisher: Vintage
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Dewey Decimal Number: 813
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Publication Date: 2008-02-12
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Reading Level: 240
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Description: Nora Gallagher’s elegant debut novel is a love story set in Los Alamos in 1945, in the shadow of the creation of the first atomic bomb.
During the last summer of World War II, in the beautiful high desert of New Mexico, a young painter, Eleanor Garrigue, discovers a delirious man lying by the river. She takes him in and cares for him, not knowing that he is Leo Kavan, a physicist who has fled Los Alamos after a deadly radiation accident. Eleanor herself has left New York to escape a stifling marriage and to renew her painting in the pure desert light. As the two reveal themselves to each other, their pasts and the present unfold in tandem, taking us from the heady New York art world to Einstein’s Berlin, from English bomb labs to the hidden city of Los Alamos. As their enemies close in, they find temporary solace together, connected and changed in unexpected ways by the brutal radiance of the war and their fierce love.
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: Wonderful Love Story |
Date: 2008-01-19 |
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Details: Oh what a beautiful love story!
This was a book I didn't want to end. The backdrop of the novel is WWII and the making of the atomic bomb. Quite hefty subject matter for a love story, but oh so powerful. The story is about a Checzh. Physicist, a wealthy american artist, a soul searching priest and other minor characters.
A bomb is being built in New Mexico where a priest has been installed in a small local church and a artist is escaping her husband in New York to reinvent herself. Enter the Physicist who has excaped in a fashion himself from the horrors of what he has been building.
The artist, Eleanor, and Physicist, Leo come together under unusual circumstances. She finds him nearly dead in a river bed and takes him to her home to recover. From there the story thickens and to tell more would spoil it too much.
It is a very real time in our History and an event that did really happen. What Nora Gallagher has done is written a timeless work of fiction surrounding this real time in our world history. It is powerful and bittersweet and you won't soon forget this story or these characters.
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Review Summary: A splendid novel |
Date: 2007-07-16 |
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Details: Nora Gallagher's debut novel was a great pleasure to read. Written with the precision of poetry, but with a novel's heft, momentum, and narrative complexity, Changing Light drew me into its vivid New Mexico landscape and launched me on a journey that I found intellectually and emotionally absorbing every step of the way. What sets this book apart from so many other contemporary novels is both its witness to beauty (of nature, of art, of well-chosen words) and its depth of moral imagination. The novel's pages are lit up by an authorial intelligence that is both compassionate and unflinchingly clear. A wonderful love story and a luminous, nuanced portrayal of moral decision-making. |
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Review Summary: Emotionally satisfying--Intellectually stimulating |
Date: 2007-07-15 |
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Details: "Changing Light" by Nora Gallagher was a delightfully surprising debut novel--a richly satisfying story, artfully and lyrically told, with profound emotional and intellectual overtones. Tangentially, this is a love story. But more directly, it tells the tales of different life-changing moral dilemmas that three characters must resolve as their lives intertwine during the spring and summer of 1945 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
At the center are two polar opposites: Eleanor Garrigue and Leo Kavan--an artist and a nuclear physicist. Off to the side and pulling each of the other two main characters into a curious triangle is Bill Taylor, the local priest. Eleanor is a woman who has temporarily fled an over-bearing husband and promising art career in New York City to find personal freedom and artistic inspiration living in the solitude and grandeur of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains just over the hill from Los Alamos. Leo Kavan is a world-renowned Czechoslovakian physicist who is brought to Los Alamos by the United States government to work as a top scientist on the Manhattan Project developing the first atomic bomb. As the local Episcopal priest, Bill Taylor is duty-bound to be Eleanor's spiritual confessor and advisor, but he is also strongly attracted to her as a woman.
This is a short novel. Gallagher does not waste time developing each main character completely as an author would have to do if this were nothing more than a love story. She gives us just enough information so that the reader feels comfortable filling in the rest. Gallagher expects intelligent readers--readers who are happy to participate in the storytelling by creating their own plausible back-stories and plot resolutions from tidbits of information thrown in to the text to spark the imagination. Don't we all do exactly this in real life whenever we meet someone new? This technique helps focus the reader's attention away from the love story, toward the true purpose of the work. But don't get me wrong--the love story here is completely believable, satisfying, mature, and enchanting--it is just not the focus of this book.
The "changing light" at the core of this novel is more than merely the beautiful artistic light that saturates the Los Alamos countryside, providing Eleanor with inspiration for her paintings. Gallagher wants us to focus on the far subtler inner light--the guiding moral compass--at the core of each character's being that changes during the course of the novel. Thus the title is apt and points toward the message of the work as a whole.
I look forward to reading more novels by this talented author. |
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Review Summary: Meh... |
Date: 2007-07-09 |
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Details: I was unimpressed with the novel as a whole. There is some interesting information on the A-bomb development and history but the characters are rather bland. We never really understand the fascination the husband, priest and Kavan all have with Eleanor b/c the description of her is so weak. She is just a generic heroine/female protagonist that we are supposed to care about b/c she paints presumably yet the paintings themselves, as another reviewer writes, are never adequately described for the reader to appreciate or understand. The characterization of Kavan is better but having all these famous incidental people in the background of the story, doing nothing, kind of reminds me of pointless cameos in movies. |
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Review Summary: praise for Changing Light |
Date: 2007-07-01 |
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Details: About page 40 something into the book I had fallen over that beloved cliff in novel reading where you pass the point of no return...when work gets abandoned, dishes pile in the sink, and at 3am when you're aren't really sleeping anyway, you might as well read for awhile...Thant's the time I reread the beginning, just to be sure I'd absorbed the background. Changing light is a sensitive and insightful story about love, scince, an artist and and the making of the atomic bomb set in Los Alamos at the end of WW2. |
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