In her intimate and epic debut novel, L. Annette Binder lifts the lid on one family's darkest story to offer vital insight into daily life under the last days of the Third Reich. The Vanishing Sky is a heartrending and blazingly lucid depiction of Nazi Germany as not a simple monolith of evil but as an oppressive, fanatical political regime that was encountered, accommodated, rejected, and survived by ordinary people, people just like you and me

Miriam Toews, author of 'Women Talking'

L. Annette Binder's The Vanishing Sky is so fiercely imagined, so wondrously conjured, that what you hold not only pulls you into its history but into a world of pure yearning, determination, struggle and hope. This is a story – in all its rich layers – that dazzles, breaks your heart, clutches you and gets you back up again. I'm grateful to have experienced it, and grateful to Binder for the gift she has given us

Paul Yoon, author of 'The Mountain'

L. Annette Binder is a stunningly talented writer. Her stories are the stories of outsiders, gripping and heartfelt, heightened with hidden undertones of the surreal. It is this tension that makes the worlds she creates so vibrant, and allows her readers to see so deeply into these characters' souls

Hannah Tinti, author of 'The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley'

The challenge in humanising the Western world's most tortured history proves no match for Binder's intellect, compassion, and unflinching gaze; one gets the feeling this writer, in the stunning precision of her painterly details, would prove virtuosic with any material she was handed to use. A hugely ambitious novel whose consummate, patient artistry is moving beyond measure

Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of 'We Are Not Ourselves'

L. Annette Binder arrives with worlds of empathy and strange surprise

Praise for 'Rise', Ron Carlson, author of 'Return to Oakpine'