Baker Towers: A Novel

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Description

Bakerton is a community of company houses and church festivals, union squabbles and firemen's parades. Its ball club leads the coal company leagues. Its neighbourhoods include Little Italy, Swedetown and Polish Hill. For its tight-knit citizens - and the five children of the Novak family - the 1940s will be a decade of tragedy, excitement and stunning change. Both a family saga and a love letter to a time and place long past, Baker Towers is a feat of imagination from a writer of enormous power and skill.

Reviews

"The living, breathing organism that is Haigh's captivating book... [is an] effortlessly haunting story... [Haigh is] an expert natural storyteller." -- New York Times

"Jennifer Haigh's ambitious, elegiac second novel, Baker Towers [is]... a rich portrait of place." -- Washington Post Book World

"An elegant, elegiac multigenerational saga. . . . Almost mythic in its ambition, somewhere between Oates and Updike country, and thoroughly satisfying." -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"[Haigh] writes convincingly of family and small town relations, as well as of the intractable frustrations of American poverty." -- Publishers Weekly

"Jennifer Haigh stakes a claim for a major breakout." -- Publishers Weekly

"In clean, authoritative prose, Haigh uncannily injects new life into an era too often entombed by nostalgia." -- Entertainment Weekly

"A good old-fashioned read... the author deftly evokes the particulars of a time and place." -- Daily News

"Terrific." -- Harlan Coben, The Birmingham News

"Haigh's writing is rich and mellifluous, and her story certainly has an old-fashioned charm and dignity to it." -- The Times (London)

"A work that is quickly boosting [Haigh's] ascension to the vanguard of 21st century American novelists." -- Patriot Ledger (Quincy, MA)

Author Bio

Jennifer Haigh is the author of the New York Times bestseller Baker Towers, winnerof the 2006 PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author;and Mrs. Kimble, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and was a finalist for the Book Sense Book of the Year. Both novels were number one Book Sense picks. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, Good Housekeeping, and elsewhere. She lives in the Boston area.