News From Heaven: The Bakerton Stories

(Paperback)

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Description

Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town that has been rocked by decades of painful transition. From its heyday during two world wars through its slow decline, Bakerton is a town that refuses to give up gracefully, binding succeeding generations to the place that made them. With a revolving cast of characters, these stories explore how our rootsthe families and places in which we are raisedshape the people we eventually become.

Reviews

"An uplifting and radiant book." -- Janet Maslin, New York Times

"Elegant stories. . . . Haigh uses well-timed plot twists to infuse them with bright new energy." -- People

"A vibrant, thought-provoking, profoundly readable contribution to the genre. . . . Each of these ten linked stories represents a distinct, shining example of Haigh's remarkable gifts for lyricism, psychological insight, and stealth humor." -- Boston Globe

"Outstanding... News From Heaven fits quite comfortably in the company of the hybrid novel-in-stories made so popular by predecessors such as Jhumpa Lahiri...and Elizabeth Strout...For Haigh, this small town is a large canvas, one filled in with precise, poignant strokes." -- Washington Post

"Haigh has a fine eye for how time works on characters' theories about themselves.... Haigh, whose first book won the PEN/Hemingway Award, has a sure grip on her characters and a belief in place as a determining factor in the shapes of our lives." -- New York Times Book Review

"This collection of short stories shows depth, understanding and compassion. . . . Haigh's narratives are beautifully realized stories of heartbreak, of qualified love, and of economic as well as personal depression." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Jennifer Haigh's stories rove across time and cultures as easily as they render the tendernesses and longings and hardscrabble deprivations of home. NEWS FROM HEAVEN is well-named, given that its unsentimental compassion and observational acuity. . . is just what we need right now." -- Jim Shepard, author of Like You'd Understand, Anyway

"The characters in Jennifer Haigh's NEWS FROM HEAVEN are so vividly drawn, the inner lives revealed so deftly, with such intelligence and sympathy, that fictional Bakerton, Pennsylvania, takes on the additional weight of, say, Winesburg, Ohio." -- Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls

"Jennifer Haigh has accomplished what James Joyce did in Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio: render a place with such exactitude the landscape, character, and fate are inextricably linked. One of America's finest novelists, Haigh is now one of our finest short story writers as well." -- bestselling author Ron Rash

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.