About this item
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPRAcclaimed 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.
About the Author
Jennifer Haigh is an American novelist and short story writer. Her new novel MERCY STREET takes on the contentious issue of abortion rights, following the daily life of Claudia Birch, a counselor at an embattled women's clinic in Boston. Her last novel, HEAT AND LIGHT, looks at a Pennsylvania town divided by the controversy over fracking, and was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and NPR. Earlier books include the novel FAITH, about a beloved Boston priest accused of a molesting a child in his parish, and THE CONDITION, the story of a woman diagnosed in childhood with Turner's Syndrome. Haigh's critically acclaimed debut novel MRS. KIMBLE won the PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction. Her second novel, the New York Times bestseller BAKER TOWERS, won the PEN/L. L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author. Her short story collection NEWS FROM HEAVEN won of the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction. A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she writes frequently for The New York Times Book Review. Her fiction has been published in eighteen languages.
