Elizabeth J. Church

Elizabeth J. Church examines women's ambitions against the roles their historical periods permit them to occupy. Her debut, The Atomic Weight of Love, traces Meridian Wallace from ornithology studies at the University of Chicago in 1941 through marriage to physicist Alden Whetstone and life in Los Alamos, where his work is tied to the Manhattan Project. Meridian's long observation of local crows keeps her scientific attention alive even as her formal career recedes. Decades later, her friendship with Clay, a young geologist and Vietnam veteran, forces a new reckoning with sacrifice and independence. Algonquin Books introduced the hardback in 2016; a paperback followed the next year. Church was born in Los Alamos to scientist parents connected to the wartime project and practiced law for more than thirty years, including work involving mental-health and constitutional issues. That background gives the novel's historical questions a personal but deliberately fictional form.