Baker Towers

Combine an involving family saga with a skilled narrator and you have a winner. Anna Fields reads this story about the people of a Pennsylvania mining town with clarity, warmth, and sympathy. As the five Novak children come of age during WWII, they experience all the possibilities of a new era, as well as the opportunities and limitations of their background and class. Fields gives believable voice to everyone from Polish grandmothers to bored East Coast debutantes and helps us care about the infuriating characters as well as the sympathetic ones. You'll stay glued to your earphones. A.C.S. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

November 22, 2004
The second novel by the author of the award-winning Mrs. Kimble
depicts life in a postwar Pennsylvania mining town and continues Haigh's exploration of the hardships of women's lives. In the town of Bakerton, dominated by the towers of the title (made of slowly combusting piles of scrap coal), poor families live in ethnic enclaves of company houses. Italian Rose Novak broke with tradition by marrying a Polish man, but he dies in the book's first chapter, and Rose and her five children struggle through the years that follow. The oldest son, Georgie, returns from WWII and avoids the mining life by marrying the posh, cynical daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia store owner. Rose's daughter Dorothy gets a wartime job in glamorous Washington but breaks down and returns to Bakerton, while capable daughter Joyce, who joins the military just as the war ends, comes home to take care of her ailing mother, resenting Georgie and Sandy, the handsome youngest brother, who escape town. Only Rose and Lucy, the awkward youngest daughter, are content with things as they are. The story climaxes with a disaster at the mine, which affects each of the Novak children. Haigh's prose never soars, but she writes convincingly of family and smalltown relations, as well as of the intractable frustrations of American poverty. Agent, Dorian Karchmar. (Jan. 4)

Forecast:
Strong publisher support, a 25-city author tour and Haigh's solid storytelling could make this a big seller.