Gone Away by Tess Manchester

A young marriage disappears into the making of the atomic bomb in this standout historical fiction.

“The chair in the corner sat empty, waiting for Joe.”

History remembers what happened at Los Alamos, the home of the Manhattan Project. In Gone Away, Tess Manchester asks what it means to be married to someone making history while you aren’t even allowed to know what he is making.

Not even twenty-one, Adrienne Kennedy follows her husband Joe into another world when he’s invited to work alongside Oppenheimer. At Los Alamos, a place that doesn’t officially exist, Adrienne becomes Audrey Cedar and her identity is reduced to a badge number.

Cut off from her family and her dreams of finishing her college education, she begins to lose her identity. She only has Joe, a man required by the government to keep secrets from his wife. Only she’s too bright for her new role—too curious yet too dedicated to their country to make a stir, and too accustomed to putting Joe first.

This is a story of marital dread, only Joe isn’t the villain. Circumstances are. He never means to leave her behind, but he continually does. His career advances; hers stops. He gets promoted; she loses jobs. He travels; she’s confined to Los Alamos, allowed to leave only once a month. He’s at the forefront of changing history with his co-discovery of plutonium, while Adrienne tries new recipes and gives birth alone. There is a suffocating loneliness throughout the novel, one that Manchester ties as much to their marriage as to the barbed wire surrounding them. The circumstances are extraordinary, but the marriage underneath them isn’t.

Manchester is at her strongest when allowing history to close in around Adrienne. Adrienne and Joe understand their sacrifices as acts of patriotic duty, shaped by the very real fear that the war overseas could reach American soil. For Adrienne, that belief makes it easier to endure a life she never chose. Manchester never makes her more modern than she needs to be. Adrienne wants more for herself, but she also loves Joe and believes in what their country is asking of them. The sacrifices she accepts become increasingly difficult to bear. It makes her loneliness harder to dismiss and her choices easier to understand.

In contrast, Joe comes to embody the war, seemingly losing his identity as a husband until there is little left of him beyond his work as a scientist. It’s only after the project ends that Manchester lets him become an ordinary person again: husband, father, professor, friend, a man suddenly easier to understand. That mirrors Adrienne’s experience of him in a devastating way that the pace itself underlines.

Gone Away doesn’t stop with the end of the project; instead, Manchester follows the Kennedys in the years that come after. It gives Joe, in particular, room to become someone beyond the scientist Adrienne spent years waiting for.

That transformation works in part because of how completely the war consumes the earlier chapters. It is more than a backdrop to the marriage; it is a taut presence alongside it, as much as Los Alamos itself. Experimental blasts sound in the distance, while rations and shortages dictate daily life. Even where Manchester fills in the gaps, she stays close to the known details of Adrienne and Joe’s lives, grounding the novel in the uncertainty of the period. There is tension in knowing what Adrienne cannot. We know what Los Alamos is building and how the war will end; Adrienne can only hear the blasts and watch her husband disappear behind a secrecy she cannot penetrate. Manchester makes that uncertainty genuinely unsettling even when the history itself holds few surprises.

There is something striking about Manchester’s dedication to bringing their story to life, even as her affection for their marriage sometimes conflicts with the marriage that emerges on the page. Adrienne’s sheer loneliness and the frequent disregard she faces from those around her are difficult to take, especially when rendered with such realism. Joe is always certain Adrienne will follow him. And she does, as his future becomes their future.

What makes Gone Away stand out is Manchester’s willingness to let these contradictions remain. Adrienne can love Joe even when her loneliness is difficult to take, just as Joe can be careless with her dreams without becoming cruel. Manchester never asks you to see either of them simply. It’s that same care that makes the novel so affecting. Manchester brings a familiar piece of American history painfully close without losing sight of the people at its center. Adrienne and Joe’s marriage is inseparable from that history, but she also allows it to become something more than history. By the end, they feel painfully, utterly human. This is a poignant novel that tells of the quiet, underrepresented side of the Manhattan Project.