Why am I passionate about this?

Was it the environmental movement, which burgeoned as I was growing up? Or remnants of Sunday School teachings? For whatever reason, I deeply believe that I have a responsibility to give back to the world more than I take. There are many ways to give back, as my characters Miranda and Russ explore in my novel I Meant to Tell You. In my nonfiction, Iā€™ve investigated the healthcare and financial industries, and also suggested steps we can take in our everyday lives as consumers, parents, and investors. When Iā€™m not writing, Iā€™m organizing environmental clean-ups, collecting supplies for refugees, and phoning public officials.


I wrote

I Meant to Tell You

By Fran Hawthorne,

Book cover of I Meant to Tell You

What is my book about?

Miranda Isaacs and her fiancĆ©, Russ Steinmann, admire her parents (antiwar activists in the Sixties) and grandfather (a union organizer)ā€¦

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Cold Millions

Fran Hawthorne Why did I love this book?

This might be the most powerful novel about U.S. working conditions since Upton Sinclairā€™s The Jungle; if I were president of the AFL-CIO, I would hand out copies at every picket line. But beyond its moral force, this is also a beautiful, page-turning story of loyalty between two young Irish-American brothers, Gig and Rye Dolan, who arrive penniless in Spokane, Washington, in the early 1900s hoping to find jobs. As they get caught up in the violent battles pitting workers against mine owners and the corrupt local police, Gig and Rye are each drawn to union activism in a different wayā€”and, in turn, draw further apart. Itā€™s a book that hit me in the head, heart, and gut in multiple ways.

By Jess Walter,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Cold Millions as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'A beautiful, lyric hymn to the power of social unrest in American history...funny and harrowing, sweet and violent, innocent and experienced; it walks a dozen tightropes' Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See
_____________________________________________

1909. Spokane, Washington.

The Dolan brothers are living by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his dashing older brother Gig dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment.

But then Rye finds himself drawn to suffragetteā€¦


Book cover of Heat and Light

Fran Hawthorne Why did I love this book?

I live in the same world where too many modern novels (including mine!) take placeā€”a world of professionals and students, people whose hands get dirty only if weā€™re repotting our tomato plants. So itā€™s wonderfully eye-opening to enter the setting of this book, along with farmers, prison guards, nurses, and other rural folks who are actually living out the current debate over natural-gas fracking. While the gas-company officials are clear villains, the townspeople on both sides are portrayed with compassion and complexity. Who are the ā€œgood guysā€ and ā€œbad guysā€ when a prison guard sells his mineral rights to the frackers for the cash to start a dairy farm? Or when a gas driller has an affair with a woman whose husband died of environmental cancer? 

By Jennifer Haigh,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Heat and Light as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Acclaimed 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 orā€¦


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Book cover of Wrightsville Beach

Wrightsville Beach by Suzanne Goodwyn,

Two years ago, devastated by the sudden death of his older brother, Hank Atwater went on a drinking rampage that ended in his being arrested. Since then, he has been working to rebuild his reputation in his hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, with little luck. But everything changes after aā€¦

Book cover of Conscience

Fran Hawthorne Why did I love this book?

Alice Mattison, the author, must have been reading my mind! This piercing novel echoes some of my conflicted feelings about the Sixties and social activism in general, even as it also probes the strains of long-term marriage and friendship. As college students, Olive, Helen, and Val took different routes during the Sixties antiwar protests. Now, when a magazine commissions Olive to write an essay about Valā€™s long-ago novel, she must confront the repercussions of those friendships and the decisions the three women made. Helen chose violent protest; Olive chose a PhD; Val chose to appropriate Helenā€™s life in her fiction. Oliveā€™s rethinking raises a question thatā€™s important for us today: How far should an ethical person go for a just cause?  

By Alice Mattison,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Conscience as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Decades ago in Brooklyn, three girls demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and each followed a distinct path into adulthood. Helen became a violent revolutionary. Val wrote a controversial book, essentially a novelization of Helenā€™s all-too-short but vibrant life. And Olive became an editor and writer, now comfortably settled with her husband, Griff, in New Haven. When Olive is asked to write an essay about Valā€™s book, doing so brings back to the forefront Olive and Griffā€™s tangled histories and their complicated reflections on that tumultuous time in their young lives.Conscience, the dazzling new novel from award-winning author Alice Mattison, paintsā€¦


Book cover of All Over Creation

Fran Hawthorne Why did I love this book?

This novel took me into a community that I rarely read about in fiction, to show the human impact of a controversial industryā€”in this case, GMO agriculture and Idaho potato farmers. From my research for two of my nonfiction books, I started with some understanding of the complex debate, and I appreciate that All Over Creation branches into more subplots beyond simply Big Agriculture versus family farms. In fact, I liked Will, the well-meaning local farmer who sincerely believes that GMO potatoes will save his ailing farm, far more than Yumi, the main character, a single mom who long ago fled potato country. She seems too caught up in her resentments against her father and hometown, to care about anyone but herself. 

By Ruth Ozeki,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked All Over Creation as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A warm and witty saga about agribusiness, environmental activism, and community-from the celebrated author of The Book of Form and Emptiness and A Tale for the Time Being

Yumi Fuller hasn't set foot in her hometown of Liberty Falls, Idaho-heart of the potato-farming industry-since she ran away at age fifteen. Twenty-five years later, the prodigal daughter returns to confront her dying parents, her best friend, and her conflicted past, and finds herself caught up in an altogether new drama. The post-millennial farming community has been invaded by Agribusiness forces at war with a posse of activists, the Seeds of Resistance,ā€¦


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Book cover of The River of Eternity

The River of Eternity by Bruce Balfour, PhD,

1184 BCE. Ramesses III, who will become the last of the great pharaohs, is returning home from battle. He will one day assume the throne of the Egyptian empire, and the plots against him and his children have already started. Even a god can die.

Ray was raised with theā€¦

Book cover of The Nix

Fran Hawthorne Why did I love this book?

At 640 pages, this exuberant saga takes an original approach toward the Sixties. The protagonistā€™s mother, Faye, got swept into the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago almost by accident, because it was part of the student scene. Thatā€™s only one of about six plotlines in this book, which focuses on Fayeā€™s abandonment of her son, Samuel, when he was a boy; her arrest for throwing gravel at a right-wing presidential candidate decades later; and the paths propelling the potential mother-son reunion. I was captivated by the energy, richness, and plot twists of this novel, which somehow manages to keep all its balls spinning. (PS: The political protests arenā€™t what they seem.)  

By Nathan Hill,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Nix as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
A New York Times 2016 Notable Book
Entertainment Weekly's #1 Book of the Year
A Washington Post 2016 Notable Book
A Slate Top Ten Book

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

ā€œThe Nix is a mother-son psychodrama with ghosts and politics, but itā€™s also a tragicomedy about anger and sanctimony in America. . . .  Nathan Hill is a maestro.ā€ ā€”John Irving 

From the suburban Midwest to New York City to the 1968 riots that rocked Chicago and beyond, The Nix exploresā€”with sharp humor and a fierce tendernessā€”the resilience of love and home,ā€¦


Explore my book šŸ˜€

I Meant to Tell You

By Fran Hawthorne,

Book cover of I Meant to Tell You

What is my book about?

Miranda Isaacs and her fiancĆ©, Russ Steinmann, admire her parents (antiwar activists in the Sixties) and grandfather (a union organizer) as role models ā€“ if they could only figure out what sorts of roles they themselves might play in changing the world in their own era. When Russ is offered what seems like his dream job, as an assistant U.S. attorney investigating business corruption in Washington DC, they joke that Mirandaā€™s family history might jeopardize his security clearance. But as it turns out, the real threat emerges after Russā€™s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for felony kidnapping seven years earlier ā€“ an arrest sheā€™d never bothered to tell Russ about.

Book cover of The Cold Millions
Book cover of Heat and Light
Book cover of Conscience

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