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Inspired by the author's family history, The Vanishing Sky is a tender and deeply moving portrait of life under the Third Reich, and of the choices faced by ordinary people caught in a dangerous political regime. All these years later and nothing had changed. Young men left and they came back broken or not at all. 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 frontlines, while fifteen-year-old Georg has swapped books for guns at a Nurnberg 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.
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Binder was born in Germany herself and evokes great sympathy for Etta and her painfully fractured family, while opening up unusual angles on the terrible conflict. Written in purposefully even prose that is nonetheless harrowing, it's an intimate tragedy that's all the more powerful for refusing the ending we fervently hope for Daily Mail
