The unprecedented impact, ideology, and geographic scope of the Second World War continue to attract new novelists who hammer the history out a little thinner each time, highlighting lesser-known massacres or sifting through minor characters to discover a representative but undiscovered guide. Dennis Bock's poignant book The Ash Garden personalizes the epic bombing of Hiroshima through Anton Böll, a German émigré physicist, and Emiko, a Japanese victim of the bomb. Bombmaker and bombed, they balance this incisive, symmetrical novel and its sustained inquiry into remorse and forgiveness.

One of 25 Hiroshima Maidens relocated from post-war Japan to America for corrective plastic surgery, Emiko remains in the U.S. as a student, then as a filmmaker. The novel is at its best with her, from the heavy losses that surround her recovery in Japan to the awkwardness of immigrating to the nation that is both her tormentor and her savior. Meanwhile, Anton, her opposite number, doesn't just return home from war, he returns having irrevocably changed war. Stubbornly proud of his work and estranged from his isolated, ailing wife, Anton offers no home to remorse, and his conflicted legacy takes a lifetime to heal. Heal it does, though, just as Anton and Emiko meet and begin to discuss their roles in the bombing. The climax may be too much for readers impatient with a Dickensian full-cast ending: like those of John Irving, Bock's symmetries are delightful to discover at the halfway point but disappointingly conspicuous by the novel's close. --Darryl Whetter


From Publishers Weekly
No matter how far they travel from Hiroshima, the protagonists of Canadian author Bock's roomy, thoughtful novel are marked by the effects of the atomic bomb. For Emiko Amai, the imprint lingers on her face, in the form of burn scars from the heat of the bomb's detonation in 1945, when she was six. For Anton B”ll, a refugee German scientist who helped build the bomb, the scars are emotional, though he tried to transform his feelings into images in a series of secret films shot among Hiroshima's ruined buildings. For Sophie, Anton's wife herself a half-Jewish refugee from Austria there is the pain of exile, a debilitating illness and the heavy shadow of her husband's guilt. Though Anton claims that the bomb was dropped "to save lives," he remains acutely aware of the human cost, both to its victims and himself: "I know the world requires a certain payment from us... for the freedoms we enjoy. We have all paid." When Emiko confronts Anton in 1995 at a lecture in New York, he surprises himself by agreeing to participate in a documentary she's filming. He invites Emiko to the quiet house he shares with Sophie in Ontario, and as Sophie declines toward death, Anton tells Emiko all the ways he has influenced her life since Hiroshima. In his attempt to obliquely represent the overwhelming horrors of Hiroshima's destruction, Bock (Olympia) has created a group of characters with closely guarded emotional lives. When they reveal themselves, it's in flashes as brilliant as the splitting of the atom. (Sept. 11)Forecast: Though his novel cannot touch a nonfiction classic like John Hersey's Hiroshima, and may be overlooked in the crowded ranks of WWII-inspired fiction, Bock acquits himself well. A first printing of 60,000 copies and a six-city author tour attest to Knopf's faith in this sophomore effort. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
More than 50 years after the bombing of Hiroshima, that event still resonates as one of the defining moments of the 20th century. This novel explores the consequences of the bomb on the lives of three people who were directly touched by it. Anton Boll, one of the scientists involved with the Manhattan project; his wife, Sophie, the daughter of an Austrian-Jewish violin maker; and Emiko Amai, a documentary filmmaker and one of the bomb's victims. All three are key players in the events leading up to and surrounding the dropping of the bomb. Boll escapes from wartime Europe to contribute a critical piece of information in the bomb's development. Sophie is sent from home aboard the SS St. Louis and ends up in an internment camp outside Quebec City. Emiko, who loses her family and half her face in the bombing, is chosen to come to the States for reconstructive surgery in an act of postwar contrition. From its achingly sad opening to its haunting conclusion, this riveting novel explores the moral ambiguities of war while illuminating a shameful moment in our collective history. Highly recommended.Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Kingston, Ont. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Set 50 years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, this poetic, affecting novel explores the legacy of that devastation through the intersecting lives of three people. Emiko, a young Hiroshima native who lost part of her face on August 6, 1945, is now a documentary filmmaker working on a feature about the bomb. Her work brings her to a small Ontario city where Anton, a German physicist who worked in Los Alamos, lives with his wife, Sophie, an Austrian refugee from World War II. Like James Thackara's recent novel about Oppenheimer, America's Children (BKL Mr 1 01), this title includes plenty of rich historical detail but keeps its focus on the human stories, especially how creators of the bomb wrestled with the reality of their life work, and, as in Bock's previous novel, Olympia (1999), how losing family during wartime forever imprints the soul. Written in richly described flashbacks that slowly reveal the characters' almost surreal connections, this deceptively understated novel asks crucial questions about how to live and reconcile history in an atomic age. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
?A crystalline meditation on the defining event of the twentieth century and its aftermath . . . Inventive and consistently challenging? ?Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times Book Review

?Mysterious and compelling. . . . An elegant, unnerving novel that illuminates the personal consequences of war.? ?Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

?Exquisite. . . . Bock?s achievement here is in creating characters with believably ambiguous edges, vulnerable people whose understanding of themselves and others is incomplete.? -Janice P. Nimura, The Washington Post Book World

?Bock has shined an illuminating searchlight on the terra incognita where the personal and the political intersect.? ?Dan Cryer, Newsday

?A splendid, powerful book, written with authority and admirable control.? ?St. Louis Post-Dispatch

?Assured and compassionate.? ?Pico Iyer, Harper?s

?[T]his brilliant novel traces the lingering effects of the Hiroshima bombing . . . showing how war binds victor and victim as surely as scar tissue closes a wound.? ?Rick Waddington, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

?Reconciliation, responsibility, blame and regret shift and fall in different patterns throughout this moving and thoughtful novel.? ?Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe

?Dennis Bock began The Ash Garden long before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, but it?s impossible now not to read his haunting debut novel outside the glare of that tragedy. . . . Bock sets a match to ethical issues that are reaching the flash point today.? ?Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor

?One can go further with this book, and say that Bock has learned just about everything that can be gained from Michael Ondaatje and Jane Urquhart in the use of compelling images. . . . Very, very accomplished.? ?T. F. Rigelhof, The Globe & Mail

?This is a gorgeous, poetic novel, with scenes that stun the senses. . . . Bock makes us see and live these lives in all their uneasy compromise.? ?Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune

?For all its worldliness, The Ash Garden feels intimate and interior. . . . [Bock?s] are the battlefields of conscience, the war away from the war.? ?Annabel Lyon, National Post


Book Description
A scientist stealing across the Pyrenees into Spain, then smuggled into America . . .

A young woman quarantined on a ship wandering the Atlantic, her family stranded in Austria . . .

A girl playing on a riverbank as a solitary airplane appears on the horizon . . .

Lives already in motion, unsettled by war, and about to change beyond reckoning—their pasts blurred and their destinies at once defined and distorted by an inconceivable event. For that man was bound for the desert of Los Alamos, the woman unexpectedly en route to a refugee camp, the girl at Ground Zero and that plane the Enola Gay. In August of 1945, in a blinding flash, Hiroshima sees the dawning of the modern age.

With these three people, Dennis Bock transforms a familiar story—the atom bomb as a means to end worldwide slaughter—into something witnessed, as if for the first time, in all its beautiful and terrible power. Destroyer of Worlds. With Anton and Sophie and Emiko, with the complete arc of their histories and hopes, convictions and regrets, The Ash Garden is intricate yet far-reaching: from market streets in Japan to German universities, from New York tenements to, ultimately, a peaceful village in Ontario. Revealed here, as their fates triangulate, are the true costs and implications of a nightmare that has persisted for more than half a century.

In its reserves of passion and wisdom, in its grasp of pain and memory, in its balance of ambition and humanity, this first novel is an astonishing triumph.



Download Description
Triangulating the fates of three separate people, this debut novel reveals the true costs of the August 1945 nightmare unleashed in a blinding flash by the Enola Gay.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
The characters in Dennis Bock's thoughtful first novel find their lives revolving around the axis of an explosive act -- the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945, and all of its shocking reverberations, from Japan to New York to a small village in Canada.

Employing the voices of three separate characters -- a scientist en route to Los Alamos, a woman under quarantine on a ship in the Atlantic, and a young Japanese girl watching as a plane slowly draws nearer in the sky -- Bock's tale wields a quiet power that builds steadily as he details the lives of these three characters and the repercussions of one unfathomable act of war.

Each of the characters in this work is scarred, whether physically or psychically, by what they have witnessed. And each of them has a story to tell another, until a perfect triangle is formed between the three.

From the first few riveting pages, Dennis Bock proves himself a literary talent worthy of the attentiveness his novel demands. Poised to stand alongside John Hersey's classic work of nonfiction, /booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?&isbn=0679721037">Hiroshima, The Ash Garden is a heartrending examination of the all-too-human dilemmas faced by the participants, both willing and unwilling, in a historic event that continues to shape our modern world and attitudes. (Fall 2001 Selection)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A scientist stealing across the Pyrenees into Spain, then smuggled into America . . .

A young woman quarantined on a ship wandering the Atlantic, her family stranded in Austria . . .

A girl playing on a riverbank as a solitary airplane appears on the horizon . . .

Lives already in motion, unsettled by war, and about to change beyond reckoning—their pasts blurred and their destinies at once defined and distorted by an inconceivable event. For that man was bound for the desert of Los Alamos, the woman unexpectedly en route to a refugee camp, the girl at Ground Zero and that plane the Enola Gay. In August of 1945, in a blinding flash, Hiroshima sees the dawning of the modern age.

With these three people, Dennis Bock transforms a familiar story—the atom bomb as a means to end worldwide slaughter—into something witnessed, as if for the first time, in all its beautiful and terrible power. Destroyer of Worlds. With Anton and Sophie and Emiko, with the complete arc of their histories and hopes, convictions and regrets, The Ash Garden is intricate yet far-reaching: from market streets in Japan to German universities, from New York tenements to, ultimately, a peaceful village in Ontario. Revealed here, as their fates triangulate, are the true costs and implications of a nightmare that has persisted for more than half a century.

In its reserves of passion and wisdom, in its grasp of pain and memory, in its balance of ambition and humanity, this first novel is an astonishing triumph.

SYNOPSIS

A scientist stealing across the Pyrenees into Spain, then smuggled into America . . .

A young woman quarantined on a ship wandering the Atlantic, her family stranded in Austria . . .

A girl playing on a riverbank as a solitary airplane appears on the horizon . . .

FROM THE CRITICS

Washington Post Book World

Each panel is created with exquisite care, and the three portraits that emerge together illustrate an eloquent truth about the aftermath of war.

Publishers Weekly

No matter how far they travel from Hiroshima, the protagonists of Canadian author Bock's roomy, thoughtful novel are marked by the effects of the atomic bomb. For Emiko Amai, the imprint lingers on her face, in the form of burn scars from the heat of the bomb's detonation in 1945, when she was six. For Anton B?ll, a refugee German scientist who helped build the bomb, the scars are emotional, though he tried to transform his feelings into images in a series of secret films shot among Hiroshima's ruined buildings. For Sophie, Anton's wife herself a half-Jewish refugee from Austria there is the pain of exile, a debilitating illness and the heavy shadow of her husband's guilt. Though Anton claims that the bomb was dropped "to save lives," he remains acutely aware of the human cost, both to its victims and himself: "I know the world requires a certain payment from us... for the freedoms we enjoy. We have all paid." When Emiko confronts Anton in 1995 at a lecture in New York, he surprises himself by agreeing to participate in a documentary she's filming. He invites Emiko to the quiet house he shares with Sophie in Ontario, and as Sophie declines toward death, Anton tells Emiko all the ways he has influenced her life since Hiroshima. In his attempt to obliquely represent the overwhelming horrors of Hiroshima's destruction, Bock (Olympia) has created a group of characters with closely guarded emotional lives. When they reveal themselves, it's in flashes as brilliant as the splitting of the atom. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

VOYA

This compelling story marries life to death, guilt to innocence, and truth to deception through the entwined lives of two Hiroshima victims over a fifty-year period—Anton, a German scientist who helps invent the bomb, and six-year-old Emiko, whose face and family it destroys. When she is fifteen, Emiko is selected to come to the United States for a series of painful plastic surgeries. There she finds that film is her passion. While composing a documentary about Hiroshima, Emiko discovers that her American benefactor is the scientist who first saw her, her grandfather, and her dying brother in a Japanese hospital. Emiko learns that plastic surgery cannot heal her emotional trauma. Anton discovers that he cannot control the ramifications of the bomb. That Anton marries an Austrian with a Jewish father;Anton's wife dies of lupus, a disease whose pattern mimics the burning radiation sores;and Emiko's grandfather, a doctor, cannot save his own family add additional irony to the story. This historical novel that sometimes discusses war, sex, and love in graphic and pragmatic terms requires readers who understand symbolism and paradox. Emiko will have the most appeal for the teen audience. In 1985, John Hersey added a chapter to the original version of his book Hiroshima (Knopf, 1946) to explain what happened to the six people he interviewed. Bock, in tracing the lives of his characters, parallels some situations and attitudes that Hersey describes. Teens should read Hersey's nonfiction account, which provides the necessary emotional and factual context, before tackling Brock's provocative narrative. Reviewer:Lucy Schall—VOYA, December 2001 (Vol. 24, No. 5)

Library Journal

More than 50 years after the bombing of Hiroshima, that event still resonates as one of the defining moments of the 20th century. This novel explores the consequences of the bomb on the lives of three people who were directly touched by it. Anton Boll, one of the scientists involved with the Manhattan project; his wife, Sophie, the daughter of an Austrian-Jewish violin maker; and Emiko Amai, a documentary filmmaker and one of the bomb's victims. All three are key players in the events leading up to and surrounding the dropping of the bomb. Boll escapes from wartime Europe to contribute a critical piece of information in the bomb's development. Sophie is sent from home aboard the SS St. Louis and ends up in an internment camp outside Quebec City. Emiko, who loses her family and half her face in the bombing, is chosen to come to the States for reconstructive surgery in an act of postwar contrition. From its achingly sad opening to its haunting conclusion, this riveting novel explores the moral ambiguities of war while illuminating a shameful moment in our collective history. Highly recommended.Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Kingston, Ont. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews