In News from Heaven, Jennifer Haigh—bestselling author of Faith and The Condition—returns to the territory of her acclaimed novel Baker Towers with a collection of short stories set in and around the fictionalized coal-mining town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania.
Exploring themes of restlessness, regret, redemption and acceptance, Jennifer Haigh depicts men and women of different generations shaped by dreams and haunted by disappointments.
Janet Maslin of the New York Times has called Haigh's Bakerton stories "utterly, entrancingly alive on the page," comparable to Richard Russo's Empire Falls.
Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town that has been 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 succeeding generations to the place that made them. With a revolving cast of characters, these stories explore how our roots—the families and places in which we are raised—shape the people we eventually become.
"Jennifer Haigh has accomplished what James Joyce did in Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio: render a place with such exactitude the landscape, character, and fate are inextricably linked. One of America's finest novelists, Haigh is now one of our finest short story writers as well."