A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart (2025)

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Named a Summer Read by: New York Times * Los Angeles Times * Minneapolis Star Tribune An expansive and poignant novel of love, radical ambition, and intellectual rebirth set at the dawn of World War I At a party near Stanford University's campus in 1917, Cora Trent, a graduate student raised in the rugged mining towns of the American West, meets Indra Mukherjee, an Indian revolutionary newly arrived in California. Indra is grieving the recent loss of a friend and unsure of the place violence has in the cause of national liberation, while Cora is seeking a new life that stays true to her aspirations as a writer and an idealist. They spark an instant connection, and their passionate romance deepens as they attend protests alongside anticolonial dissidents and socialize with eccentric thinkers in Berkeley and Palo Alto. All the while, Indra awaits orders from a mysterious German spymaster. Cora and Indra quickly marry, even as