The Vanishing Sky

Author L. Annette Binder
Narrator Laurel Lefkow
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Run Time 9 hours and 36 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Adventure fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction, Political structures: totalitarianism and dictatorship, Politics and government, Second World War fiction, Society and Social Sciences.

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What to expect

‘A heartbreaking portrait of an ordinary family shattered by a war they didn’t want’ The Times

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 frontlines, while fifteen-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.

Critics Review

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
A moving tale of a family destroyed by war . . . Inspired by her family’s history, Binder unfolds a harrowing tale in limpid, expressive prose
Sunday Times
Binder’s debut explores familiar territory from a fresh perspective. The result is an engrossing novel peopled by believable and sympathetic characters
Mail on Sunday
Achingly beautiful . . . Binder’s work is subtle and compassionate yet also clear and devastating in its depiction of a nation – and its people – suffocating under the weight of an insidious and inhuman ideology, one that ultimately devastates those who believe its illusions. Enduringly relevant
The Advertiser
Eloquent, and painfully human
Irish Examiner
An empathic portrayal of the human cost of war . . . Binder’s etched prose, her unwillingness to whitewash complicty, and the focus on Etta, a mother trying to hold her family together as madness and horror descend, offers a genuinely tragic vision
Sydney Morning Herald
Heartwarming and exciting . . . This book, along with movies such as Hitler’s SS, A Portrait of Evil, and JoJo Rabbit, explain how the strands of hatred reached out and entrapped whole families in a web of evil
Jerusalem Post
The novel has an unfussy, understated feel – reflected in Binder’s calm prose – that belies its powerful impact. It’s alternately subtle and striking, quiet and then, suddenly, deafeningly loud
Country and Town House
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'
L. Annette Binder’s The Vanishing Sky is so fiercely imagined, so wondrously conjured, that what you hold not only pulls you into its history but into a world of pure yearning, determination, struggle and hope. This is a story – in all its rich layers – that dazzles, breaks your heart, clutches you and gets you back up again. I’m grateful to have experienced it, and grateful to Binder for the gift she has given us
Paul Yoon, author of 'The Mountain'
L. Annette Binder is a stunningly talented writer. Her stories are the stories of outsiders, gripping and heartfelt, heightened with hidden undertones of the surreal. It is this tension that makes the worlds she creates so vibrant, and allows her readers to see so deeply into these characters’ souls
Hannah Tinti, author of 'The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley'
The challenge in humanising the Western world’s most tortured history proves no match for Binder’s intellect, compassion, and unflinching gaze; one gets the feeling this writer, in the stunning precision of her painterly details, would prove virtuosic with any material she was handed to use. A hugely ambitious novel whose consummate, patient artistry is moving beyond measure
Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of 'We Are Not Ourselves'
L. Annette Binder arrives with worlds of empathy and strange surprise
Praise for 'Rise', Ron Carlson, author of 'Return to Oakpine'
Oustanding . . . A must read if you are fan of WWII historical fiction
The Portugal News

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