Showing results by author "Roberta Silman" in All Categories

Berlin. Wartime. A city of secrets - secrets that destroyed Paul Bertram's once-idyllic marriage. When the Berlin Wall falls in 1989, Paul is finally compelled to confront his past. Seeking one last chance at redemption, Paul turns to his former wife, Eve, and together they embark on a journey during which he is able, at last, to reveal the awful truths he has lived with for so long.

Pregnant with her first child, Diny Branson is haunted by her mother's death years ago in the Hudson River. Was it suicide or accident? Slowly, Diny weaves the many threads of Lise's tragic life - from a fairyland youth to a happy marriage, then through the travails of losing a child.

After a chance meeting in 1981, Lily Fialka confronts the defining time of her life: 1943-45 in Los Alamos, when her physicist husband, Peter, worked on the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project - a time of isolation, hard work, temptation, and loneliness yet exhilaration and triumph; when great breakthroughs were made but lives felt narrow; when loyalty was paramount, but the need for secrecy created unbearable tension.

Are there really second chances? It is the 1970s, and Mady Glazer is trying to hold herself and her three children together after the shocking death of her charismatic husband, David, in a plane crash. When they finally go on vacation to Racer’s Cove at the eastern end of Long Island, they meet Hans Panneman, a bachelor and potter who was brought up in Africa, whose father was an avid Nazi, and who escaped his earlier life by settling here and leading the quietest of lives.

Summer Lightning by Roberta Silman is a dazzling new historical novel that tells the story of an immigrant Jewish family from the challenging prewar years all the way through to the Kennedy assassination. Silman’s captivating characters take risks as they strengthen their ties to those they left behind in Europe, and to the dazzling Manhattan art scene of the '50s and '60s, and the Black community.