' The Vanishing Sky paints a haunting portrait of a nation slowly collapsing. Annette Binder has crafted a spellbinding novel about the choices we make for country and for family.

Drawing inspiration from her own father's time in the Hitler Youth, L. The Vanishing Sky is a World War II novel as seen through a German lens, a story of the irreparable damage of war on the home front, and one family's participation-involuntary, unseen, or direct-in a dangerous regime. Meanwhile, miles away, her younger son Georg has taken his fate into his own hands, deserting his young class of battle-bound soldiers to set off on a long and perilous journey home. Etta strives to protect him from the Nazi rule, even as her husband, Josef, becomes more nationalistic and impervious to Max's condition. When Max returns from the front, Etta quickly realizes that something is not right-he is thin, almost ghostly, and behaving very strangely. Etta, a mother from a small, rural town, has two sons serving their home country: her elder, Max, on the Eastern front, and her younger, Georg, at a school for Hitler Youth. In 1945, as the war in Germany nears its violent end, the Huber family is not yet free of its dangers or its insidious demands.

For readers of Warlight and The Invisible Bridge, an intimate, harrowing story about a family of German citizens during World War II.

The vanishing sky