News from Heaven

Set in Bakerton, Pennsylvania- the company town that was the setting of Jennifer Haigh’s award-winning bestseller Baker Towers-News from Heaven explores how our roots, the families and places in which we are raised, shape the people we eventually become.

Through a series of connected stories, Haigh brilliantly portrays this close-knit community from its heyday during two world wars to its decline in the final years of the twentieth century. Exploring themes of restlessness, regret, redemption and acceptance, she depicts men and women of different generations shaped by dreams and haunted by disappointments. A young woman glimpses a world both strange and familiar when she becomes a live-in maid for a Jewish family in New York City. A long-lost brother makes an unexpected and tragic homecoming. A woman must come to terms with a heartbreaking loss when she discovers a shocking family secret. A solitary middle-aged woman tastes unexpected love when a young man returns to town. And characters familiar to fans of Baker Towers-indomitable Joyce Novak, her eccentric sister Dorothy, and their mysterious younger brother Sandy-return for an encore performance.

Written with poignant realism, News from Heaven deftly captures our desire for escape and our need for connection, and reveals the enduring hold of a past that remains ever present in the lives of ordinary people struggling to understand themselves and define their place in the world.