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. 'There was no shelter without her sons.' 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. Henry Prize Stories, One Story, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, Third Coast, Fairy Tale Review and others.A New York Times Book Review Summer Reading Selection For readers of Warlight and The Invisible Bridge, an intimate, harrowing story about a family of German citizens during World War II. Her fiction has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the PEN/O.

Binder 'uses Etta Huber, a hausfrau in a rural village, as a means of feeling her way back into the past, channeling the anguish and uncertainty of the final months of the fighting,' said Alida Becker for the New York Times Book Review’s Summer Reading recommendations.īinder has degrees from Harvard, UC Berkeley and the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. But I find it gripping, powerful, and a brave narrative, unsparing in its honesty…,' wrote Larry Zuckerman for Historical Novels Review.

Binder tells her story patiently, like an artist placing tiny pieces into a mosaic this literary novel isn't one to race through. '…The Vanishing Sky reveals the German home front as I've never seen it in fiction. Georg, Etta’s younger son, is off at a camp run by the Hitler Youth, digging trenches as the Allied armies approach. The elder, Max, returns from the Eastern Front, haunted by what he has seen. In The Vanishing Sky, Binder takes the reader back to a rural setting in Germany near the end of World War II, where Etta Huber and her two young sons have become entrapped by the brutally re-ordered world of the Third Reich.

The vanishing sky