HANNAH'S WAR

Debut novel about America and Germany's race to create the first atomic bomb, inspired by the extraordinary female scientist Albert Einstein called "the Mother of the Bomb."

Dr. Hannah Weiss, a brilliant physicist, is the only woman among the top scientists at Los Alamos working directly with Oppenheimer on the bomb's final stages. A Jewish Austrian woman, she's maligned and underestimated by her American colleagues, and is quickly the prime suspect when someone begins leaking prized nuclear secrets to the Reich.

Major Jack Delaney, a rising star in the shadowy world of military intelligence, is dispatched to find the mole, but as he interrogates Dr. Weiss, he becomes enmeshed and seduced by a cross-cultural love affair where even his own secrets can't be preserved.

This dramatic love story set among the final years of World War II was inspired by Dr. Lise Meitner, a brilliant and unsung physicist whose face should be staring out of every scientific textbook. With the inspiring, true-to-life interest of HIDDEN FIGURES and THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY, this novel will have wide-spread book-club appeal to fans of LILAC GIRLS and THE NIGHTENGALE.

In a race against annihilation told in astonishing literary style, HEART OF THE ATOM synthesizes the most powerful force: love in a time of war.

Jan Eliasberg is an award-winning writer/director. Her prolific directing career includes dramatic pilots for CBS, NBC, and ABC, such as Miami Vice and Wiseguy; countless episodes of television series, including Bull, Nashville, Parenthood, The Magicians, Blue Bloods, NCIS: Los Angeles, Supernatural, and dozens of others; as well as the feature film Past Midnight, starring Paul Giamatti, the late Natasha Richardson, and Rutger Hauer. Eliasberg also has a storied career as a screenwriter, writing films driven by strong female leads, including Fly Girls about the Women Air Service Pilots in WWII for Nicole Kidman and Cameron Diaz at FOX 2000, among many others.
For her directing, she has won the Emmy, Imagen, and NAACP Image Awards. Her screenplays have been honored by the BBC Short List; Film Independent's prestigious Producers Lab, and the Athena Film Festival's Best Screenplays about female leaders. For writing, Eliasberg received the Francis Ford Coppola Fiction Prize and the Jacobsen Fellowship at the Wesleyan Writer's Conference.

HEART OF THE ATOM originated as a screenplay and has at various times had A-list actors like Ryan Reynolds, James McAvoy, Hugh Jackman, and others attached.