Welcome to Northshire Live L. Annette Binder when she presents her new historical novel and a Northshire staff favorite, THE VANISHING SKY, an intimate, harrowing story about a family of German citizens during World War II in a wide-ranging literary conversation with Sandell Morse author of THE SPIRAL SHELL: A French Village Reveals its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II.
L. Annette Binder's 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. Drawing inspiration from her own father's time in the Hitler Youth, Binder has crafted a spellbinding novel about the choices we make for country and for family. "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
In the course of her writing residency over a three-year period in the village of Auvillar, Sandell Morse learns of acts of bravery and rebellion on the part of several of the Jewish families and individuals who risked their lives to save innocent refugees and children orphaned by the Holocaust, and gradually gains their trust enough for them to share the details of their harrowing experiences of rebellion and resistance. The author in turn discovers truths about her own life and Jewish heritage in America, which she now sees in the light of the bravery and selflessness of those who elected to act and not stand by idly in the face of oppression and genocide. "The Spiral Shell is an evocative, probing, heartfelt memoir, as rich in character and detail as the best fiction." -- Alice McDermott
