Baker Towers

Jennifer Haigh's second novel is an intimate portrait of love and family, which will appeal to fans of Anne Tyler and Carol Shields. Stanley Novak is a first-generation Polish immigrant. Seeking a better life, he settles in Bakerton and finds work in the booming local mine. He meets and marries Rose, a shy, beautiful Italian girl. They move to a mine-owned house in an area of town known as Polish Hill, teeming with immigrants from all over Europe, all chasing the American Dream. Five children follow for the Novaks. The Novak children belong to what will someday be known as the Greatest Generation, but for now, they are just trying to find their identities in a vastly changing world. The five children could not be more different. The eldest, George, avoids signing up but is drafted to the Pacific when America joins the war. He comes home determined to leave Bakerton behind, but finds it much more difficult the second time around. Dorothy is a fragile and naive girl, who finds it hard to cope with her desk job in Washington. Joyce, fiercely intelligent, must hold the family together and remains bitterly aware of the life that she could have had. Sandy, the youngest boy, swans through life with his movie-star looks, never taking responsibility for his actions. And Lucy, the youngest, must find her own path in the shadow of her formidable siblings. Haigh gives us a beautiful snapshot of a small town -- of company houses and union squabbles; the boom and bust of the post-war years; the immigrant neighbourhoods of Swedetown, Little Italy and Polish Hill; the miners, undertakers, soldiers, firemen and housewives who populate the town and bring it to life.

Literature & Fiction

jennifer-haigh

Contemporary

Harpercollins Pb

Mrs. Kimble

HarperCollins, Publishers

In the summer of 1976, during their annual retreat on Cape Cod, the McKotch family came apart. Now, twenty years after daughter Gwen was diagnosed with Turner's syndrome—a rare genetic condition that keeps her trapped forever in the body of a child—eminent scientist Frank McKotch is divorced from his pedigreed wife, Paulette. Eldest son Billy, a successful cardiologist, lives a life built on secrets and compromise. His brother Scott awakened from a pot-addled adolescence to a soul-killing job and a regrettable marriage. And Gwen—bright and accomplished but hermetic and emotionally aloof—spurns all social interaction until, well into her thirties, she falls in love for the first time. With compassion and almost painful astuteness, The Condition explores the power of family mythologies—the self-delusions, denials, and inescapable truths that forever bind fathers and mothers and siblings.

The Condition

Harper

A New York Times Bestseller A PEN/Hemingway Award-winning Author A Featured Alternate of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Doubleday Book Club, and the Literary Guild In a stunning follow-up to her bestselling debut, Mrs. Kimble, Jennifer Haigh returns with a compelling story of love and loss in a western Pennsylvania mining town in the years after World War II.

Thorndike Press

Heat and Light: A Novel

United States

HarperCollins Publishers and Blackstone Audio

news from Heaven

Dreamscape Media

Ploughshares (Winter 2011-12 Vol. 37 No. 4)

fiction by James Franco

conversation with Elizabeth Bishop

poetry by Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy, J.D. McClatchy

profile of Alice Hoffman

Ruth Blank

Ann Leary

Others

Emerson College

Auftauchen

Droemer/knaur

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