Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Haigh returns to
the Pennsylvania town at the center of her iconic novel Baker Towers
in this ambitious, achingly human story of modern America and the
conflicting forces at its heart--a bold, moving drama of hope and
desperation, greed and power, big business and small-town families.
Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines
closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now Bakerton has been
granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale,
a massive deposit of natural gas.
To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral
rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn't count on the truck
traffic and nonstop noise, his brother's skepticism or the paranoia of
his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning
their frail daughter. Meanwhile his neighbors, organic dairy farmers
Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling--until a passionate
environmental activist disrupts their lives.
Told through a cast of characters whose lives are increasingly bound by
the opposing interests that underpin the national debate, Heat and
Light depicts a community blessed and cursed by its natural resources.
Soaring and ambitious, it zooms from drill rig to shareholders' meeting
to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to the ruined landscape of the
"strippins," haunting reminders of Pennsylvania's past energy booms.
This is a dispatch from a forgotten America--a work of searing moral
clarity from one of the finest writers of her generation, a courageous
and necessary book.
