Neal Stephenson · 2024 · exile

The first of Stephenson's Bomb Light cycle. Dawn Rae Bjornberg is born in Montana to cowboy anarchists, raised in Leningrad as Aurora by a Leninist father, sent back to America as a teenager, drawn into the Bonus Army and gunrunning - and ends up in a Ural steel town being assessed by the men who will become the KGB.

1. 1
   Montana

   Dawn Rae Bjornberg is born in 1916 to a clan of cowboy anarchists in the American West - a family of Wobblies and homesteaders, which is not the background anyone expects of a future Soviet intelligence asset.

2. 2
   Leningrad

   Brought to Petrograd at four by a Communist father who renames her Aurora, after the cruiser whose gun signalled the Revolution - a communal apartment, a mother cast off and sent home, and a purge that takes her surrogate family.

3. 3
   Montana

   Back to the States as a teenager, into the Depression - and the gap between the two halves of her upbringing, which Stephenson uses to build a person who belongs entirely to neither country.

4. 4
   Washington

   1932, and the Bonus Army: veterans camped in the capital demanding what they were promised, her father sent to radicalise them, and Patton clearing the camps - which is where she gets drawn into gunrunning.

5. 5
   Chicago

   A Communist commune and a job selling comfortable shoes to women at the Century of Progress, the 1933 World's Fair - and a physicist, and the beginning of the atomic thread the whole Bomb Light cycle is about.

6. 6
   Magnitogorsk

   The steel city in the Urals, where the novel's present tense happens: Aurora under interrogation, being assessed by the organisation that will become the KGB, and telling the story we have been reading.