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Aug 5, 2025
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Description
A fateful summer of secrets and lies alters the trajectory of a young girl’s life in this glimmering debut about love, addiction, and the power of storytelling.
I’d been raised on secrets, I knew they weren’t a good idea.
Sixteen and living in a small Michigan town, Gertie is harboring a secret heavy enough to fracture her closest friendship. She and Cindy have been bonded since birth by the fact their fathers are addicts, but their unsteady home lives are a little easier when they’re together, sprawled on trampoline vinyl with pilfered vodka and dreams of moving to New York.
Everything was changing so fast. I didn’t know what was real.
After an accident involving a bonfire and an aerosol can sends Gertie to the hospital, she finds herself with nowhere to go but to Sioux Falls to live with her newly clean father. She sees it as a chance to escape the hometown drama she's caused, but it finds her all the same: parties without curfews, boys without boundaries, a compromising photo, tragedy back home . . . and her father, once again teetering on the edge of oblivion. Terrified of the consequences of being honest with Cindy, her sole refuge is the fantasy novel she’s writing, a portal to another world and the story of a young girl roaming a strange land, trusting her wits to survive.
I had to become a different person before I’d even figured out who I was in the first place.
Years later, when ghosts of the past surface, Gertie decides to write again about that explosive summer from the stabler shores of adulthood. Powered by the fierce imagination of her youth, Gertie finally allows herself the grace to tell a version of her story that she always hoped would be true.
Written with the feel and power of a ticking time bomb, Atomic Hearts is an unforgettable story of the relationships that shape us beyond all reason and the ways it might be possible to pull ourselves back from the brink.
I’d been raised on secrets, I knew they weren’t a good idea.
Sixteen and living in a small Michigan town, Gertie is harboring a secret heavy enough to fracture her closest friendship. She and Cindy have been bonded since birth by the fact their fathers are addicts, but their unsteady home lives are a little easier when they’re together, sprawled on trampoline vinyl with pilfered vodka and dreams of moving to New York.
Everything was changing so fast. I didn’t know what was real.
After an accident involving a bonfire and an aerosol can sends Gertie to the hospital, she finds herself with nowhere to go but to Sioux Falls to live with her newly clean father. She sees it as a chance to escape the hometown drama she's caused, but it finds her all the same: parties without curfews, boys without boundaries, a compromising photo, tragedy back home . . . and her father, once again teetering on the edge of oblivion. Terrified of the consequences of being honest with Cindy, her sole refuge is the fantasy novel she’s writing, a portal to another world and the story of a young girl roaming a strange land, trusting her wits to survive.
I had to become a different person before I’d even figured out who I was in the first place.
Years later, when ghosts of the past surface, Gertie decides to write again about that explosive summer from the stabler shores of adulthood. Powered by the fierce imagination of her youth, Gertie finally allows herself the grace to tell a version of her story that she always hoped would be true.
Written with the feel and power of a ticking time bomb, Atomic Hearts is an unforgettable story of the relationships that shape us beyond all reason and the ways it might be possible to pull ourselves back from the brink.
Product Details
| Publisher | Ballantine Books |
| Publish Date | August 05, 2025 |
| Pages | 352 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780593875353 |
| Dimensions | 9.3 X 6.1 X 0.9 inches | 1.2 pounds |
About the Author
Megan Cummins is the author of If the Body Allows It, awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her stories and essays have appeared in A Public Space, Guernica, One Teen Story, Ninth Letter, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She edits at Public Books, a magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship. Atomic Hearts is her debut novel.
Reviews
“Gertie is a heroine for the ages—I challenge you to find a reader who doesn’t fall in love with her dark humor, her vulnerability, her flaws, or her complicated affection for everyone around her. Atomic Hearts explodes with love and tenderness on every page.”—Maria Kuznetsova, author of Something Unbelievable
“Heartfelt and harrowing . . . Reading Atomic Hearts feels like getting to crawl inside the mind of a quiet best friend.”—Allison Larkin, author of The People We Keep
“A nuclear blast to the emotional core . . . Part teenage summer fling, part family tragedy, Megan Cummins’s debut is the most exquisitely written, bighearted journey into friendship, addiction, and the frustrations that come with parenting our parents. With sentences sharp enough to cut, dialogue that will make you laugh out loud, and a story that will break your heart open again and again, Atomic Hearts is the kind of novel that will send you scrambling for your phone to call your best friend, your mom, your dad, and let them know how much they matter.”—Nick Fuller Googins, author of The Great Transition
“Brilliant . . . explores the long path to self-fulfillment, how we discover our place in the world, and what we owe to others along the way. . . . Megan Cummins uncovers the troubling, intricate mystery of human connection, how we survive the worst of it, and sometimes don’t. She lays bare how we manage, despite enormous hurdles, to collapse the remote distances between us, and how each of us is a portal to worlds unseen.”—Sarah Blakely-Cartwright, author of Alice Sadie Celine
“An exquisite first novel about the body’s fragility, the spirit's opacity, and the elastic absolution of narrative. Megan Cummins’s restless, devoted protagonist—a young writer working toward something like truth in the shadows of her father’s addiction, and in friendship’s frank light—is the kind of protagonist I’ll find myself thinking of years later, as of a good friend: ‘I should call Gertie.’”—Rachel Lyon, author of Self-Portrait with Boy and The Fruit of the Dead
“A live scroll on love, loyalty, who we are in our wrongdoings, and how we end up with the one we end up with . . . Cummins captures all of her characters in their wide and earnest humanness. This novel sustains the empathy it calls for and reminds us that one need not be a saint to achieve redemption. I closed the book at the end, but my heart was still open.”—Sidik Fofana, author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs
“Heartfelt and harrowing . . . Reading Atomic Hearts feels like getting to crawl inside the mind of a quiet best friend.”—Allison Larkin, author of The People We Keep
“A nuclear blast to the emotional core . . . Part teenage summer fling, part family tragedy, Megan Cummins’s debut is the most exquisitely written, bighearted journey into friendship, addiction, and the frustrations that come with parenting our parents. With sentences sharp enough to cut, dialogue that will make you laugh out loud, and a story that will break your heart open again and again, Atomic Hearts is the kind of novel that will send you scrambling for your phone to call your best friend, your mom, your dad, and let them know how much they matter.”—Nick Fuller Googins, author of The Great Transition
“Brilliant . . . explores the long path to self-fulfillment, how we discover our place in the world, and what we owe to others along the way. . . . Megan Cummins uncovers the troubling, intricate mystery of human connection, how we survive the worst of it, and sometimes don’t. She lays bare how we manage, despite enormous hurdles, to collapse the remote distances between us, and how each of us is a portal to worlds unseen.”—Sarah Blakely-Cartwright, author of Alice Sadie Celine
“An exquisite first novel about the body’s fragility, the spirit's opacity, and the elastic absolution of narrative. Megan Cummins’s restless, devoted protagonist—a young writer working toward something like truth in the shadows of her father’s addiction, and in friendship’s frank light—is the kind of protagonist I’ll find myself thinking of years later, as of a good friend: ‘I should call Gertie.’”—Rachel Lyon, author of Self-Portrait with Boy and The Fruit of the Dead
“A live scroll on love, loyalty, who we are in our wrongdoings, and how we end up with the one we end up with . . . Cummins captures all of her characters in their wide and earnest humanness. This novel sustains the empathy it calls for and reminds us that one need not be a saint to achieve redemption. I closed the book at the end, but my heart was still open.”—Sidik Fofana, author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs
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