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Let It Destroy You
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Harriet Alida Lye, Charlie Carrick
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
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Let It Destroy You
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Publisher's Summary
Winner, Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction
Inspired by the true story of a dangerous atomic weapon and the man who designed it, here is a stunning novel of morality, creation, and loss from the acclaimed author of The Honey Farm and Natural Killer.
It is August 12, 1945. Tomorrow, August Snow will be tried at the International War Crimes Court for patenting a more lethal variation on the atomic bomb. He invented a radiation machine to cure his young daughter’s cancer, despite knowing that the very same technology was capable of great destruction, and inevitably profited from disaster. But are his intentions relevant when the fate of the world is at stake?
August’s former wife, June, will also attend the hearing. Restless in her Hague hotel room the night before, she keeps watch over their daughter and reflects on the events that brought them here. She had nothing to do with making the bomb. But is she innocent? Wouldn’t any wife and mother have done the same thing in her shoes? And now, will it cost her everything?
Inspired by the physicist Leó Szilárd and the letters he wrote his wife, Gertrud "Trude" Weiss, Let It Destroy You is told in parallel narratives and ventures from Budapest to Berlin to Colorado, and back to Europe. It is a love story about two people whose destinies are bound by everything they share, and all that they’ve kept from one another. Above all, it is a testament to the logic-defying love of a parent who will stop at nothing to protect their child.
What the critics say
“A dextrous hand at mood and pace, Toronto writer Lye . . . examines idealism and ambition, intent and outcome, and, with particular acuity, marriage and the complex, unpredictable ways its faltering can play out.” —Toronto Star
“A complex and magnificent drama . . . Lye’s great achievement is the creation of two very different and fully realized first-person narrators, and her storytelling style luxuriates equally in their interiority and their extraordinary circumstances.” —Quill & Quire
“Reading Harriet Alida Lye’s prose is to be given the delicious gift of sinking deeper into the human experience. Let It Destroy You offers us this gift through the remarkable story of June and August, lovers fraught with passion and tension that comes alive on the page, as their pursuits of love and science collide spectacularly. This is a story of how the atomic bomb was born, but it’s also a tender and intelligent exploration of two people trying to understand who they are—and what they’re capable of—through the lens of one another, and the daughter they share. Lye’s singular observations about life and exquisite characterizing details tell us so much about a person, a moment, a feeling. This stunning novel cements her as one of my very favourite writers. Let It Destroy You is exceptional.” —Ashley Audrain, international bestselling author of The Push
“The paradox of loneliness in marriage, the shockwave of parental love—staged against history’s most devastating invention, the story of August and June Snow is a tender, anguished duet, glimmering with intelligence and grace.” — Sarah Henstra, Governor General's Award-winning author of The Red Word