February 15, 2007 7:30 PM
The Cost of Love and Conscience
Acclaimed spiritual memoirist Nora Gallagher brings her elegant prose to her first work of fiction: a love story set in the summer of 1945 in the shadow of Los Alamos and the making of the first atomic bomb. In Changing Light, Gallagher asks: what would have happened had one of the physicists decided to leave the Manhattan project and work against it?
“Gandhi said that the atom bomb ‘resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see,’” says Gallagher. “That question is what I have been turning over in my mind since completing this work.”
Gallagher, who grew up near Los Alamos, feared both the weapons in the hands of the nation’s enemies and the bombs hidden just across the river. Inspired by her proximity to this place of secrecy and guilt, her novel is about questions of conscience and faith, and about real people negotiating their way in a painfully significant historical interlude.
Gallagher explored her experiences of writing and the imagination, and our capacity to find moral clarity by bringing to light shadowed history.