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. A hugely ambitious novel whose consummate, patient artistry is moving beyond measure.' - Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of WE ARE NOT OURSELVES 'The challenge in humanizing 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. 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 '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 story is gripping, and the characters are fully realized, flawed individuals.' - New York Journal of Books ' The Vanishing Sky paints a haunting portrait of a nation slowly collapsing. Annette Binder has crafted a spellbinding novel about the choices we make for country and for family.

Drawing inspiration from her own father's time in the Hitler Youth, L. The Vanishing Sky is a World War II novel as seen through a German lens, a story of the irreparable damage of war on the home front, and one family's participation-involuntary, unseen, or direct-in a dangerous regime. Meanwhile, miles away, her younger son Georg has taken his fate into his own hands, deserting his young class of battle-bound soldiers to set off on a long and perilous journey home. Etta strives to protect him from the Nazi rule, even as her husband, Josef, becomes more nationalistic and impervious to Max's condition. When Max returns from the front, Etta quickly realizes that something is not right-he is thin, almost ghostly, and behaving very strangely.

Etta, a mother from a small, rural town, has two sons serving their home country: her elder, Max, on the Eastern front, and her younger, Georg, at a school for Hitler Youth. In 1945, as the war in Germany nears its violent end, the Huber family is not yet free of its dangers or its insidious demands. Included in the New York Times Book Review's Summer Reading Guide for Historical Fiction For readers of Warlight and The Invisible Bridge, an intimate, harrowing story about a family of German citizens during World War II.

The vanishing sky binder