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Two intrepid spies navigate the early years of Nazi aggression and the looming threat of the atomic bomb.

While Polostan (2024), the first book in Stephenson’s Bomb Light series, followed Dawn Rae Bjornberg/Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva, an American cowgirl turned Soviet spy, the second installment follows Owen Crisp-Upjohn, the British journalist she meets playing polo in Russia. When Aurora reveals to Owen that Russia has assigned her to seduce him, and asks him to help her escape the country by appearing to fall in love with her so the spy agency will send her out after him, he’s only too happy to oblige. After he leaves the USSR, he embarks on his own wild adventure on assignment to find a wayward earl in Australia, and doesn’t meet up with Aurora again until they both arrive in Barcelona just in time to be swept up in the Spanish Civil War. After managing to survive Spain, they meet back up with the Earl of Suffolk in Paris, and quickly dive into the efforts of the French and the British to obtain precious “heavy water”: a strange new invention that has something to do with nuclear “fission,” which the scientific community seems to think will change everything about modern warfare and world politics. Owen and Aurora are fictional characters, but they interact with many real-world figures—like the rather incredible Earl of Suffolk, who made enormous contributions to the early efforts to prevent the Nazis from obtaining nuclear capabilities, which are little-enough known that the average reader will be on the edge of their seats. There is plenty of history and science to be learned in these pages, and Owen’s lack of technical knowledge makes him the perfect point-of-view character to make the chemistry lessons serve the story and keep the plot moving. Stephenson gives his readers credit for being smart enough to follow his robust prose style and, as always, those readers are in for something truly remarkable.

A rich historical thriller that makes chemistry as exciting as espionage.