A writer delves into the life of her grandfather, who helped build the atomic bomb.

"Half-Life of a Secret," by Emily Strasser.

Emily Strasser's debut book, "Half-Life of a Secret," begins with a photograph, one that hung in her grandparents’ lake house: It's of her grandfather, George, (who died before Strasser was born) standing in front of a mushroom cloud made by a nuclear blast.

Strasser thought little of it until years later when it occurred to her that perhaps, "the world wasn't as it had appeared," for the image didn't correspond to the idyll her grandparents had built: long summer days swimming with cousins, catching sunfish and watching the "mirror-still lake" as "a heron rose like a ghost from the opposite shore, crossed the distance with steady, slow wingbeats, and landed on our dock."

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"Half-Life of a Secret" by Emily Strasser; University Press of Kentucky (336 pages, $26.95)

"To tell a story, one must decide what counts and in what order." — author Emily Strasser

"What is it to love a home founded on such violence for the sake of further violence?" — author Emily Strasser asked while writing her book

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