What would happen if a Hiroshima survivor encountered one of the scientists responsible for the atomic bomb? Emiko Amai was six years old when on 6 August 1945 she survived the first atomic bomb. Her parents were killed, and her younger brother horrifically injured. A decade later she was among the twenty-five scarred 'Hiroshima maidens' brought to the United States for reconstructive surgery. For Anton Boll and his colleagues at Los Alamos, New Mexico, news of the explosion was a confirmation of a dream. Boll was a refugee of conscience from Germany, a recruit to Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project, who believed the sooner they cracked these nuclear equations, the safer the world would be. With a remarkable clarity and perception Dennis Bock's compelling and poignant novel explored what happens half a century later, when Anton and Emiko finally stand face-to-face.