The lives of the Los Alamos atomic scientists have been written about in great detail. What TaraShea Nesbit’s novel tries to do is imagine a fictional community that was formed when the families of those scientists converged on a small section of New mexico in 1943. No one knew how long their work would take, so they all just had to dig in for the long haul.

At first, The Wives of Los Alamos seemed more like a collection of notes typed up in preparation for the writing a real novel, but the farther I got along, the more convinced I was by the author’s approach to the complicated story she was trying to tell.