Gone Away by Tess Manchester follows Adrienne Kennedy, a twenty-one-year-old Berkeley student whose plans change after her husband, chemist Joe Kennedy, accepts a secret assignment during World War II. Adrienne leaves university for Los Alamos, a guarded settlement in New Mexico where residents live under false names and strict military supervision. Joe disappears into classified laboratory work while Adrienne tries to build a home inside a place that officially does not exist. Her position in the project gradually brings her closer to its hidden purpose, though security rules prevent Joe from explaining what he is helping create. As World War II continues beyond the mesa, Adrienne faces the possibility that the future she postponed may be changed permanently by the work surrounding her.

In Gone Away, Tess Manchester brings wartime Los Alamos to life with prose and a strong sense of history. Manchester's obvious period knowledge appears naturally in Adrienne Kennedy’s daily routine, such as the ration stamps required at the settlement commissary. Manchester also accomplishes perhaps the most difficult literary trick of all: making 1940s technology easy to picture, like Adrienne learning to route urgent calls across the Manhattan Project site on a busy PBX switchboard. I like how the era both shapes Adrienne but also lets us see her as a woman ahead of her time. She's not afraid of standing up to an intelligence officer, and she does this on her own, and very differently, from those defending Manhattan Project director Robert Oppenheimer. This is a fully fleshed-out story with a natural voice and pacing that gives it all room to breathe. It will be widely embraced by readers of historical fiction and those with a soft spot for this unique corner of the war effort.

Tess Manchester’s Gone Away opens in 1943, when Berkeley senior Adrienne Kennedy thinks her future is perfectly mapped out until her new husband Joe, a charming chemistry teacher, is enlisted into J. Robert Oppenheimer’s top-secret war project. Adrienne trades her graduation for a one-way train ticket into the desert, arriving at a makeshift town that does not exist officially and carrying a numbered badge and a code name. While Joe disappears every day to work behind barbed wire, she routes calls at the switchboard, hauls mail as a postwoman, and sorts books in the library. She becomes friends with some of the resourceful wives who keep the small community running. Months turn into years, and she struggles in the mud, deals with rationing and unending construction, slowly piecing together fragments of a monumental secret consuming everyone she loves. Her experience changes from adventure into a test of loyalty, grit, and identity.

Tess Manchester delivers immersive worldbuilding with details that offer a whole portrait of life in a secret project: censored letters, water shortages, stolen evenings at Edith Warner's Tea House, and “Black Beauty” stoves. Characters are exceptionally sculpted, and I loved Adrienne, who makes for an endearing guide; she is an ordinary woman thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Her warm and gently funny voice will entice readers as it grounds the story, even as history rumbles beneath it. The storytelling is episodic, and the tension grows with suspicions and the secretive nature of the setting and Joe’s work. Yet, there are moments when the community is roused by a midnight fire, a violent desert storm, or a blinding flash on the horizon. Gone Away is a well-plotted, expertly written story about the unsung labor of women in wartime, sacrifice, and the strain secrecy places on a marriage. Fans of Denise Kiernan's The Girls of Atomic City will not want to miss this book.