Bombshell - Tapa dura

Liza Wieland's mesmerizing new novel poses the questions: what if such a criminal, whose personal losses and obsessions have terrorized America, had a daughtera beautiful blonde dancer in Las Vegas? What if she had a stepbrother who knew the truth? Wieland's novel suggests that the legacy of The Bomb detonated on July 16, 1945, is this mad professor's string of bombings, fifty years later. Through the personal stories of these three characters, Wieland shows that it's never clear where privacy ends and public life begins. And that we must take part in the lives around us, take blame, take care."

LIZA WIELAND grew up in Atlanta, the setting for her award-winning first novel, "The Names of the Lost," which is also a story based on newspaper headlines about an unexplained string of child murders (SMU, 1992). As she puts it, "When I think about where my books come from, it seems to me that there's no such thing as the whole truth. Except in fiction. News, history, fact, all masquerade as truth, but for me, they are never enough; they never tell the whole story. My interest is in imagining the story complete." The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a 1999 NEA Fellowship, Wieland has published two story collections, "Discovering America" (Random House, 1994) and "You Can Sleep While I Drive" (SMU, 1999). She teaches creative writing and American literature at California State University.