Ash Garden - Softcover

The unprecedented impact, ideology, and geographic scope of the Second World War continue to attract new novelists who hammer the history out a little thinner each time, highlighting lesser-known massacres or sifting through minor characters to discover a representative but undiscovered guide. Dennis Bock's poignant book The Ash Garden personalizes the epic bombing of Hiroshima through Anton Böll, a German émigré physicist, and Emiko, a Japanese victim of the bomb. Bombmaker and bombed, they balance this incisive, symmetrical novel and its sustained inquiry into remorse and forgiveness.

One of 25 Hiroshima Maidens relocated from post-war Japan to America for corrective plastic surgery, Emiko remains in the U.S. as a student, then as a filmmaker. The novel is at its best with her, from the heavy losses that surround her recovery in Japan to the awkwardness of immigrating to the nation that is both her tormentor and her savior. Meanwhile, Anton, her opposite number, doesn't just return home from war, he returns having irrevocably changed war. Stubbornly proud of his work and estranged from his isolated, ailing wife, Anton offers no home to remorse, and his conflicted legacy takes a lifetime to heal. Heal it does, though, just as Anton and Emiko meet and begin to discuss their roles in the bombing. The climax may be too much for readers impatient with a Dickensian full-cast ending: like those of John Irving, Bock's symmetries are delightful to discover at the halfway point but disappointingly conspicuous by the novel's close. --Darryl Whetter

"Dennis Bock's searching, ambitious first novel tells the intertwining stories of two
people from opposite sides of the world who have spent their lives learning to live with the bomb [and] quickly hardens into a crystalline meditation on the defining event of the 20th century and its aftermath... Inventive [and] consistently challenging." Los Angeles Times Book review

"An intellectually demanding, yet emotionally affecting, first novel...A shattering yet generous story not merely about survival guilt or scientific ethics, but the imperfection and resilience of the human condition." -- Kirkus Reviews

"Dennis Bock creates his disturbing universe in the manner of the great moralists like Shusaku Endo or Athol Fugard. Grounding the two predominant man-made horrors of the last century in the lives of his three main characters, Bock's risk-taking imagination, his compassionate intelligence and superb writing, make THE ASH GARDEN an evocative must-read experience." --Wayson Choy

"THE ASH GARDEN can stand comparison with the best novels of our time. It is magnificent." -- Leon Rooke

"THE ASH GARDEN is a controlled explosion of a story, hugely energetic, powerful, and complex...Bock's writing is both dense and immensely readable, as engaging when it focuses on life's minutiae as when it explores life's catastrophes. THE ASH GARDEN is difficult to forget and it rewards repeated readings in a way that few novels can."--Quill and Quire