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The world's first atomic mushroom cloud rises above the New Mexico desert. Physicists Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi are there to watch the detonation. The bomb's third 'godfather' Leo Szilard, is in Chicago. As the bomb detonates, all three find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings having, somehow, arrived in the year 2003. Lydia Millet's novel tells an extraordinary story of the three scientists who formed the core of the team that developed the atomic bomb. With the exploding of the first bomb in Nevada, Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi are transported to today's America. As they gradually realise what has happened to them, all three are consumed by guilt at the impact of their brainchild. At first the only person who believes they are who they say they are is a librarian who recognises Oppenheimer from his photograph in a book. With her they travel to Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Bikini, in the footsteps of the bomb itself, on a journey of atonement which eventually leads them to organise a protest march from Nevada to Washington DC. As the media increasingly respond to their presence and their claims, an ever stranger crowd of followers gather round the three scientists, first of young leftists, subsequently of fundamentalist Christians, some of whom see Oppenheimer as Messiah, leading to a climactic apothesis that is both utterly surreal and movingly beautiful. Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is no more a SF novel than The Time-Traveller's Wife. Instead it is a powerful and original fiction of responsibility and guilt, today's America, and the peculiar terrors of our nuclear world. Millet's latest novel is a black-comic tour de force depicting the "second coming" of atomic bomb creators Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard. Despite being dead, these scientists are spotted in Santa Fe by a shy librarian, who joins them on a pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. An extraordinarily original novel of the A-bomb era, comparable to Vonnegut, Delillo, Murakami and Houellebecq in its unsettling power.'Millet is da bomb. Literally. While the 60th anniversary of the Trinity test has seen an awe-inspiring proliferation of books about the atomic experiment, Millet's blackly comic fifth novel Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (Soft Skull), is more interesting and insightful than a silo full of them... Though Oh Pure and Radiant Heart possesses the nervy irreverence of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, Millet makes the subject matter her own, capturing the essence of these geniuses in a way that can only be described as, well, genius.' Vanity Fair

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