Let It Destroy You Paperback by Harriet Alida Lye

Product Details

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart (2023-06-06)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 256 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780771000423
• Item Weight: 260.82 grams
• Dimensions: 8.24 x 5.53 x 0.69 cm

Winner, Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction
Vine National Canadian Jewish Book Awards (Fiction), Shortlist

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.

About the Author

HARRIET ALIDA LYE is the author of the novel The Honey Farm, the memoir Natural Killer, and co-author of the picture book Serge the Snail Without a Shell. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, The Happy Reader, Hazlitt, Vice, Catapult, and more. She lives in Toronto.