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News From Heaven
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In ten interconnected short stories, Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town 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 — sometimes cruelly — succeeding generations to the place that made them. With a revolving cast of characters — many familiar to fans of Baker Towers — News from Heaven looks unflinchingly at the conflicting human desires for escape and for connection, and explores the enduring hold of home.
Advance praise for News From Heaven
“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.”
“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 — as well as its quiet insistence that the personal is the political — is just what we need right now. ”
“In her depiction of Bakerton, Pennsylvania’s inhabitants and exiles, Jennifer Haigh has accomplished what James Joyce did in DUBLINERS and Sherwood Anderson in WINESBURG, OHIO: render a place with such exactitude that landscape, character, and fate are inextricably linked. Haigh is already recognized as one of America’s finest novelists; this collection confirms she is one of our finest short story writers as well.”
“Vibrant, thought-provoking, profoundly readable...Each represents a distinct, shining example of Haigh’s remarkable gifts for lyricism, psychological insight, and stealth humor.”
“News From Heaven is a lovely, timeless collection of stories. Here are subtly-drawn characters reckoning with the gravitational and sometimes devastating pulls of desire, place and family. ”
“This is a masterly collection.”