In a stunning follow-up to her best-selling debut, Mrs. Kimble, Jennifer
Haigh′s second novel, BAKER TOWERS, is a compelling story of love and
loss in a western Pennsylvania mining town in the years after World War
II.
Bakerton is a company town, built on coal; a town of church festivals
and ethnic neighborhoods, hunters′ breakfasts and firemen′s parades. Its
children are raised in company houses - three rooms upstairs, three
rooms down. Its ball club leads the coal company league. The twelve
Baker mines offer good union jobs, and the looming black piles of mine
dirt don′t bother anyone. Called Baker Towers, they are local landmarks,
clear evidence that the mines are booming. Baker Towers mean good wages
and meat on the table, two weeks′ paid vacation and presents under the
Christmas tree.
The mines were not named for Bakerton; Bakerton was named for the mines.
This is an important distinction. It explains the order of things.
Born and raised on Bakerton′s Polish Hill, the five Novak children come
of age in wartime, a thrilling moment when the world seems on the verge
of changing forever. The oldest, Georgie, serves on a mine sweeper in
the South Pacific and glimpses life beyond Bakerton, a promising future
he is determined to secure at all costs. His sister Dorothy, a fragile
beauty, takes a wartime job in Washington D.C. and finds herself
unprepared for city life. Brilliant Joyce longs to devote herself to
something of consequence but instead becomes the family′s keystone,
bitterly aware of the opportunities she might have had elsewhere. Her
brother Sandy sails through life on looks and charm, and Lucy, the
volatile baby, devours the family′s attention and develops a bottomless
appetite for love.
BAKER TOWERS is a family saga and a love story, a hymn to a time and
place long gone, to America′s industrial past and the men and women we
now call the Greatest Generation. This is a feat of imagination from an
extraordinary new voice in American fiction, a writer of enormous power
and skill.
