Nicky moonlights as a stagehand and affectionately spars with Calla. In the same neighborhood, Sam Borelli and his daughter, Calla, struggle to keep their small theater running. Their three sons and their wives and Dom and Jo’s nephew Nicky Castone also live in the family home. Curmudgeon Dom is tempered by his sweet wife, Jo. The Palazzini brothers, Dom and Mike, each run a cab company but do not speak to each other owing to a feud. F Trigiani’s 13th adult novel (after All the Stars in the Heavens) is set in early 1950s Philadelphia and follows the lives of two families, the Palazzinis and the Borellis. Verdict Providing plenty of detail without slowing the story down, this title is recommended for an audience that enjoys alternate history with a solid grounding in reality.-Mark Hanson, Maranatha Baptist Univ. While pondering what might have been, this insightful work provides a sobering look at how fragile the whole process of building an atomic weapon really was. Physicist and best-selling author Benford ( Timescape) keeps most of his narrative solidly grounded in historical facts but not overwhelmingly so, and his engaging and compelling characters (all real people) are easy to connect with.

Rather than targeting the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the first “little boy” is deployed June 5, 1944, on Berlin. In this alternate history (illustrated with historical photographs), Karl, being in the right place at the right time, moves up the timetable on the making of the first atomic bomb. SF Karl Cohen is working under Harold Urey as a physics research assistant at Columbia University, where their discoveries bring them into the circle known as the Manhattan Project.

The berlin project by gregory benford