[image]
[title]By Jennifer Haigh. Harper Perennial, $15.
In News from Heaven, recently released in paperback, Jennifer Haigh returns to the coal country that inspired the best-selling novel Baker Towers. Spanning fifty years, these interconnected stories find the citizens of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, coping with loss, recognizing new love, and discovering the world’s cruelty and kindness. Haigh’s characters—gamblers, spinsters, up-and-comers and has-beens—push their luck for the right reasons. They also pine for those they’ve lost, bear witness to the chaos wrought by war and note how battle forever changes the lucky young men who return.
Books of short stories often come across as disjointed sampler platters, offering limited tastes of the author’s abilities, but News from Heaven remains a cohesive work. Though the tales’ action reaches beyond Pennsylvania, the small coal town of Bakerton serves as the hub. This veneration of place, despite its hardships, is what gives Haigh’s first collection its potency. It showcases not only Bakerton’s influence on its people, and their effect on one another, but the author’s proficiency as well.