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Baker Towers
Jennifer Haigh, 2005HarperCollins
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060509422
Summary
After her 2003 award winning novel, Mrs. Kimble, Jennifer Haigh 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. (From the publisher.)