SHOCKWAVE | Countdown to Hiroshima | Walker *NEW*

Opening with the first test of the bomb at Los Alamos, three weeks before the real thing, Walker cross-cuts between the scientists and military men - General Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the members of the Enola Gay crew, Bob Caron, Paul Tibbets and the others, and the citizens of Hiroshima in the hours leading up to 9.15am, August 6. There is Taeko Nakamae, a schoolgirl who was a little over half a kilometre from where the bomb exploded but survived, Shuntaro Hida, a doctor attempting to treat the victims of the bomb, and Yoshito Matsushige, a press photographer whose five photographs of the devastation are the only visual record we have of that day. (Matsushige appears to have been so appalled that he forgot his professional curiosity and only took the five images.)

Walker's hold over the narrative and his gift for visual evocation make the book compulsively readable, though at times his attempts to tighten the suspense results sometimes in a flashy, melodramatic style that seems in slightly poor taste: the annihilation of a city and its inhabitants doesn't seem the right pretext for thriller-style excitements. It doesn't get the better of him, however, and for most of the time Shockwave has an immediacy and intensity that lodges its well-marshalled detail in the mind.