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, Iāve investigated the healthcare and financial industries, and also suggested steps we can take in our everyday lives as consumers, parents, and investors. When Iām not writing, Iām organizing environmental clean-ups, collecting supplies for refugees, and phoning public officials.
This might be the most powerful novel about U.S. working conditions since Upton Sinclairās 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 wayāand, in turn, draw further apart. Itās a book that hit me in the head, heart, and gut in multiple ways.
'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¦
I live in the same world where too many modern novels (including mine!) take placeāa world of professionals and students, people whose hands get dirty only if weāre repotting our tomato plants. So itās 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 āgood guysā and ābad 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?
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¦
In the first century, Romeās celebrated love poet Ovid finds himself in exile, courtesy of an irate Emperor, in the far-flung town of Tomis. Appalled at being banished to a barbarous region at the very edge of the Empire, Ovid soon discovers that he has a far more urgent -ā¦
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 Valās 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 Helenās life in her fiction. Oliveās rethinking raises a question thatās important for us today: How far should an ethical person go for a just cause?
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 Helenās 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 Valās book, doing so brings back to the forefront Olive and Griffās 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¦
This novel took me into a community that I rarely read about in fiction, to show the human impact of a controversial industryāin 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 Creationbranches 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.
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¦
Christopher Jope was supposed to be the next great celebrity heartthrob. But then he was demoted to third wheel in the supernatural throuple romance he starred in years ago. Now, heās a B-list celebrity at best, struggling to find success in his work or love in his personal life.
At 640 pages, this exuberant saga takes an original approach toward the Sixties. The protagonistās 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. Thatās only one of about six plotlines in this book, which focuses on Fayeās 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 arenāt what they seem.)
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
āThe Nix is a mother-son psychodrama with ghosts and politics, but itās also a tragicomedy about anger and sanctimony in America. . . . Nathan Hill is a maestro.ā āJohn Irving
From the suburban Midwest to New York City to the 1968 riots that rocked Chicago and beyond, The Nix exploresāwith sharp humor and a fierce tendernessāthe resilience of love and home,ā¦
Ferry to Cooperation Island
by
Carol Newman Cronin,
James Malloy is a ferry captain--or used to be, until he was unceremoniously fired and replaced by a "girl" named Courtney Farris. Now, instead of piloting Brenton Islandās daily lifeline to the glitzy docks of Newport, Rhode Island, James spends his days beached, bitter, and bored.