Atomic Family

Ciera Horton McElroy

Description

• Advance reader copies 
• SIBA and NAIBA appearances 
• Author tour in Southeast and Missouri 
• Goodreads giveaway 
• Social media and online campaigns 
• Outreach to book clubs and reading groups
  

• An enduring and timeless environmental fiction: While a general audience will also enjoy this book, fans of Charlotte McNaughty’s Once There Were Wolves and Richard Powers’ The Overstory will find a new favorite eco-fiction novel in Atomic Family. While the book takes place decades ago, this narrative is increasingly relevant to a world combating environmental crisis.
  
• Debut novel from a powerful emerging voice: In addition to fiction published in a number of journals, Ciera has written for film and digital projects. In Atomic Family, she masterfully evokes the early 1960s—the daily life of housewives on the edge of a revolution, as well as the fraught atmosphere of the duck-and-cover era.
  
• Inspired by McElroy’s real-life family story: This impeccably researched story is inspired by McElroy’s grandfather, who was a nuclear physicist at an atomic plant in the South in the 1960s. McElroy drew from a rich family history, photographs, declassified reports, and primary sources in crafting this novel.
  

Sujets

• Historical
• Fukushima (Fukushima)
• Años 1960
• Chernóbil
• Communism
• Savannah River
• Red Scare
• General officer
• Silent Spring
• 1960s
• Chernobyl
• Printemps silencieux
• General
• Aiken
• Southern
• Family Life
• Communisme
• Tchernobyl
• Fukushima
• Fiction
• Hiroshima

Informations

• Publié par: Blair
• Date de parution: 28 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781949467956
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Atomic Family
A Novel
CIERA HORTON M C ELROY
—BLAIR—
Copyright © 2023 by Ciera Horton McElroy
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design by Laura Williams
Interior design by April Leidig
Blair is an imprint of Carolina Wren Press.
The mission of Blair/Carolina Wren Press is to seek out, nurture, and
promote literary work by new and underrepresented writers.
We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support of general operations by the Durham
Arts Council’s United Arts Fund and the North Carolina Arts Council.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
This novel is a work of fiction. As in all fiction, the literary perceptions and
insights are based on experience; however, all names, characters, places, and incidents
are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference
to any real person is intended or should be inferred.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McElroy, Ciera Horton, 1995– author.
Title: Atomic family : a novel / Ciera Horton McElroy.
Description: Durham : Blair, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022025122 (print) | LCCN 2022025123 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781949467949 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781949467956 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT : Novels.
Classification: LCC PS 3613. C 4226 A 94 2022 (print) |
LCC PS 3613. C 4226 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220525
LC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2022025122
LC ebook record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2022025123
For Mitchell and Foster
And for Dad, of course
PART I
Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day
when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman
and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by
the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment
by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war
must be abolished before they abolish us.
—John F. Kennedy, Address before the United Nations, 1961
Do I love this world so well
That I have to know how it ends?
—W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety

FIRST, THERE IS THE PLANE. The boy watches from the water tower, using his binoculars for a closer look. It moves slowly, widens like an ink spill. The sky is gray, the light pale.
This is November 1, 1961. A Wednesday.
Below him, the boy can see the whole town. The houses are brick and uniform. South Carolina flags flap blue and white in the wind. Pumpkins still smile from porches, and paper lanterns lie abandoned on the sidewalks, crumpled now and singed. A procession of women marches down Main Street. They’re wearing black and carrying signs.
On the edge of town is the bomb plant, all cement, steel, and smoke, with men in hard hats, men with briefcases, men in army vests with guns strapped to their backs. Past the barbed perimeter, down the snaking river, vapor dissolves over the cypress trees like breath in cold air.
The steam is a steady cloud that cups the town.
When the plane passes, its pewter belly low in the sky, there is a roar, then a cavity of quiet. But what the protesters will remember are the birds: that shock of frightened plovers. The women lower their pickets, pause with their baby carriages. They watch the gray clouds shift above them, see the ruffle of white and brown feathers as the birds lift into the sky. They return their gaze to the courthouse, where a woman in black stands warning about nuclear war.
Just below the boy is a schoolyard, brick and columned. The water tower rises to the sky like a watchman along the school’s fenced wall. This is where the children stand screaming, pointing up. They see his little brown head, far above them, barely discernible at the tower’s edge. He watches the plane.
It’s only a passenger plane, heading to Atlanta. But the boy perched on the water tower does not know this. Their town is the site of a bomb plant, he knows. Their town is a target.
He is a small boy—he is an odd one. And when he falls, his body folds into an impossible shape, like an origami crane. His binoculars, having slipped from his neck, hit the ground first.
NELLIE
The party is not going well.
For one thing, Dean is late—and most of the guests are his friends, not Nellie’s. Half the time she opens the door and blanks on the person’s name as they bustle past, carrying dishes wrapped in aluminum. They are coworkers, mostly, and plant wives. They are, quite frankly, friends of convenience. Not to mention, no one seems much in a Halloween mood, not when the news this morning spoke of a real terror, the stuff of nightmares. The Soviets launched a test bomb in the Arctic, 1500 times more powerful than Fat Man and Little Boy.
Nellie had no conception of destruction like that, could not imagine 1500 Hiroshimas.
Still, the party guests come with their “spooky” dishes to share. The house is over-warm and overcrowded. Orange light slices through the venetian blinds and catches the dust particles dancing in the air. Nellie plays hostess like it’s a game. She throws candy at the trick-or-treaters and suffers through small talk about that Catholic in the White House. She keeps the radio on rockabilly and even compliments frumpy Harriet’s checker-print dress.
She is trying her best, she really is. But she nurses a laundry list of complaints, not the least of which is that Dean is late when this was his idea to begin with. There are not enough wine glasses, not enough chairs. The ice is all melting, and they’ve run out of tea. Dean gave her a tiny, shameful budget, so she had to ask guests to contribute food. (How her mother would be mortified.) Plus, the house is really too small for anyone but three: nine hundred square feet of wallpaper and wood decorated with secondhand furniture. “Good bones,” Dean said when they moved years ago, but she hated this image. So skeletal, so ghastly.
Nellie stops by the crowded couch, watches Frank Tuckerman and Sander Preston deal a game of rummy. Allen Conway—a squat man, soft in the stomach, but a loud type—pokes through the bookshelf. Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: Physics and Human Knowledge . Hal Sorenson, Dean’s boss, examines the cuckoo collection over the mantle. And there by the potluck table is Wilson’s teacher—Nellie always forgets her name. Patricia? Pamela? Peggy? Best not to guess and be wrong—and Nellie doesn’t remember inviting her. But here she is with her husband, who runs the Civil Defense Agency. Nellie only remembers this because he phoned last spring to say that Wilson cycled over, alone, with questions about fallout, and was she aware of this? She said, “Yes, of course,” because any other answer would admit a sort of negligence. She rarely knows where Wilson is.
The men cheer as Frank Tuckerman plays a winning pair.
All day there has been this: the manic rush before the storm of a party. She walked to the grocery store and carried the bags back herself. She dragged an ammonia-dipped rag along the floor. Of course, she consulted her Bible—the Sears catalog—for inspiration, trying to make their Halloween potluck as posh as humanly possible. Still, as she arranged breadsticks—or “wizard wands”—she couldn’t help but feel shallow for caring about a party. Especially with the news on the radio: The Soviets have launched the largest hydrogen test bomb in the nuclear age. Already they’re calling it “Tsar Bomba.” Is it wrong that she worries about having placemats that match? That she cringes at the sight of the card table in the makeshift living room space? She wants cocktails in glass. She wants wedding china on arranged runners, table settings with hand-tipped name cards, not borrowed bowls with foil. Her work seems of little consequence beside the hefty weight of Dean’s research at the plant. Years from now, scholars and students will remember his name, his contributions. He could win awards. (The Nobel!) He could have his name on a plaque. But her light will fade like dying stars. No one would remember a failed party. Everyone would remember a failed bomb.
It’s 6:45. Time for a cigarette. Nellie squeezes past two crewcut men in a quarrel about Checkpoint Charlie. “We were this close, this close to another goddamn fight in Germany.”
This is not proper party discussion. Then again, how can one think of anything else these days? The world has gone mad. Sometimes it seems like the war never ended, only evolved into something dark and thick like molasses, something impossible to swallow.
At the coatrack, Nellie fumbles through her purse for a cigarette. She finds one, just as the doorbell chimes. When she swings the door open, a flush of cool air enters the house. A girl stands on the steps, no older than six, wearing a tubular black dress and wide-brimmed hat. She is pale with cinnamon freckles. Pearls collar her neck.
“And what are you, little pumpkin?” says Nellie, cigarette between her teeth. She stoops for the candy bowl.
“I’m not a pumpkin,” says the girl. “I’m Holly Golightly.” With the child’s lisp, Nellie hears “go like me.”
That movie. Nellie saw the film at the cinema and immediately, it struck something deep and long-buried inside her. There was a wistfulness she recognized. She saw Audrey Hepburn outside Tiffany’s with her Danish, always looking in on a private, secret world, never able to enter, never quite there . And she thought, why yes. That’s exactly what it’s like.
“Caramel or chocolate?” says Nellie. Before the child can answer, Nellie drops a caramel in the pail.
What mother lets her child see Breakfast at Tiffany’s , anyway? That’s what she wants to know.
She watches the girl retreat to the sidewalk. But instead of returning to her guests, Nellie follows and closes the door behind her.
The sun is warm as it sinks behind the trees, but the air i