Baker Towers » (Reprint)

With her PEN/Hemingway Award-winning debut, Mrs. Kimble (2003), Jennifer Haigh established herself as a writer to watch. Since then, this dazzling young novelist and short story writer has demonstrated an uncanny knack for creating rich, complex characters whose lives resonate with real-world rhythms.

Jennifer Haigh, "the next great American author" (Fort Worth Star Telegram) whose debut novel Mrs. Kimble was compared to The Hours (Washington Post Book World)...returns with BAKER TOWERS, a family saga set in coal mining Bakerton, PA during the industrial boom following WWII.

BAKER TOWERS is an intimate exploration of love and family set in a western Pennsylvania coal town in the years following World War II. Bakerton is a town of company houses and church festivals, union squabbles and firemen's parades. Its ball club leads the coal company leagues. Its neighborhoods are Little Italy, Swedetown and Polish Hill.

For the five Novak children, the forties are a decade of tragedy, excitement and stunning change. George comes home from the war determined to leave Bakerton behind and finds the task impossible. Dorothy is a fragile beauty hooked on romance. Brilliant Joyce holds the family together, bitterly aware of the life she might have had elsewhere, while her brother Sandy sails through life on looks and charm. At the center of it all is Lucy, the volatile baby, devouring the family's attention and developing a bottomless appetite for love.

BAKER TOWERS is both a family saga and a love letter to our industrial past, to the men and women known as the Greatest Generation; to the vibrant small-town life of America's Rust Belt when it was still shiny and new.

The Washington Post - Nancy Reisman

Baker Towers is, finally, a rich portrait of place, its meaning not in the towers themselves but in the community that created them, and Haigh's readers will empathize with Lucy Novak's wish to remain.