Dimensions
153 x 228 x 19mm
Linked to the city of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, the rural mining community home to her bestselling and award-winning second novel, BAKER TOWERS-which Janet Maslin of the New York Times called "Utterly, entrancingly alive on the page"-Jennifer Haigh's short stories trace the lives of ordinary people over the course of the twentieth century as they come and go from small-town life. She masterfully captures the human condition and the way in which where we come from-our families and our communities-shapes the people we will become, whether through our determination to change or our resignation to circumstance. In "Beast and Bird," a teenage Polish girl returns to Bakerton from New York City where she has been keeping house for a Jewish family. The family needs the spare room for cousins coming over from Europe, and the Polish girl will learn of the horrors of war. Later, in "Broken Star," a family secret comes to light too late for a life to be saved, and an adult woman comes to terms with the sister she never knew she had. A middle-aged woman, once nurse to her now-deceased parents, finally finds love with a younger man returned to town in "Thrift." But in a place as small as Bakerton, news and rumors outpace their subjects. The Washington Post praised Haigh's ability to bring "a refreshing degree of humanity to a story you think you know well" in her novel Faith, and here, in NEWS FROM HEAVEN, she imbues these stories of generations of hometown dreamers and their hopes, both realized and not, with that same refreshing humanity that makes readers want to keep turning the page.
Throughout this beautiful, expertly wrought collection, Jennifer Haigh displays her incredible skill for telling stories and for getting to the heart of her characters. As the NEW YORK TIMES recently described her, Jennifer Haigh is a "subtle, serious novelist," and in NEWS FROM HEAVEN, she brings her unerring talent to the art of the short story.
