Ash Garden, The

Description:
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF A HIROSHIMA SURVIVOR ENCOUNTERED ONE OF THE SCIENTISTS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ATOMIC BOMB? This is the way Emiko Amai recalls August 6th, 1945 - the day she survived the Hiroshima bomb. Emiko was six years old, her parents killed, her younger brother hanging on to life by a thread. A decade later Emiko was among the twenty-five 'Hiroshima maidens' brought for reconstructive surgery to the United States. For Anton Boll and his colleagues at Los Alamos, New Mexico, news of the explosion was confirmation of a dream. Boll was a refugee of conscience from Germany, a recruit to Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project who believed the sooner they cracked these nuclear equations, the safer the world would be. With remarkable clarity and perception Dennis Bock's compelling and poignant novel explores what happens half a century later, when Anton and Emiko finally stand face-to-face.

Review:
6 August, 1945 and six-year-old Emiko survives the Hiroshima bomb although her face is badly burned, her parents killed and her younger brother gravely injured. Anton B ll was a German refugee of conscience who worked on the atom bomb project in the hope that it would help end the war. What would happen if 50 years after Hiroshima, Emiko and Anton meet? A sombre story told in language that is as clinical as a surgeon's scalpel.

Prizes:
Shortlisted for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2003.

Author Biography:
Dennis Bock lives in Toronto. His first work of fiction, OLYMPIA, was published by Bloomsbury in 1998.