The Atomic Weight of Love

(Paperback)

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A luminous and enthralling story of birds and science, ambition and sacrifice, revolutions both big and small and the late blooming of an unforgettable woman.

I first loved him because he taught me the flight of a bird. I was too young to realise that what I really yearned to know was why birds take flight and why, sometimes, they refuse.

Meridian Wallace has lived through the Second World War, the atomic age, the Vietnam War and the dawn of the new millennium yet she has always been torn between who she is and who circumstances demand her to be.

In 1941, spirited, ambitious and determined to prove worthy of the sacrifices her mother made for her, Meridian won a place at the University of Chicago to study ornithology. The last thing she expected was to fall in love with a man two decades older: her brilliant physics professor, Alden Whetstone or for him to be recruited to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to take part in a mysterious wartime project.

When Meridian defers her plans to join him, she agrees to give Alden a year of her life. But this is a world, and a time, in which a wife cannot be a scientist and a woman cannot choose her own destiny. What begins as an electrifying intellectual partnership soon evolves into something quite different.

As the decades pass, Meridian strives to resist the clipping of her wings. It is a choice that will make her enemies and bring her heartache, but it also opens up unexpected possibilities: of freedom, and friendship and transformation

Reviews

A striking story of a woman forced to choose between the future she desires or the path society insists she take Harpers Bazaar

An elegant glimpse into the evolution of love and womanhood Kirkus

Churchs debut will likely strike a chord, especially with women who find that not much has changed in our patriarchal society since Meris time, and that Meris story might well be their own Booklist

A tightly crafted novel New York Times Book Review

A fast pace and a light tone keep this charming debut gliding along Sunday Times

Author Bio

Elizabeth J. Church was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Her father, a research chemist, was drafted out of Carnegie Mellon University, where he was pursuing his graduate studies, and was sent to join other scientists working in secret on the Manhattan Project. Church's mother, a biologist, eventually joined her husband in Los Alamos. Church practiced law for over thirty years, focusing on mental health and constitutional law issues. She is the author of The Atomic Weight of Love. All the Beautiful Girls is her second novel. She lives in Northern New Mexico.