Baker Towers
By Jennifer Haigh
(Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780060509422, 368pp.)
Publication Date: December 2, 2005
Categories: Sagas, Historical - General
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Bakerton is a community of company houses and church festivals, of union squabbles and firemen's parades. Its neighborhoods include Little Italy, Swedetown, and Polish Hill. For its tight-knit citizens -- and the five children of the Novak family -- the 1940s will be a decade of excitement, tragedy, and stunning change. Baker Towers is a family saga and a love story, a hymn to a time and place long gone, to America's industrial past, and to the men and women we now call the Greatest Generation. It is a feat of imagination from an extraordinary voice in American fiction, a writer of enormous power and skill.
Jennifer Haigh is the author of the New York Times bestseller Baker Towers, winner of the 2006 PEN/L. L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author, and Mrs. Kimble, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and was a finalist for the Book Sense Book of the Year. Both novels were number one Book Sense picks. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, Good Housekeeping, and elsewhere. She lives in the Boston area.
"The living, breathing organism that is Haigh's captivating book. [is an] effortlessly haunting story. [Haigh is] an expert natural storyteller."
-New York Times
"A work that is quickly boosting [Haigh's] ascension to the vanguard of 21st century American novelists."
-Patriot Ledger (Quincy, MA)
"Haigh's writing is rich and mellifluous, and her story certainly has an old-fashioned charm and dignity to it."
-The Times (London)
"Jennifer Haigh's ambitious, elegiac second novel, Baker Towers [is]. a rich portrait of place."
-Washington Post Book World
"A good old-fashioned read... the author deftly evokes the particulars of a time and place."
-Daily News
"[Haigh] writes convincingly of family and small town relations, as well as of the intractable frustrations of American poverty."
-Publishers Weekly
"Jennifer Haigh stakes a claim for a major breakout."
-Publishers Weekly
"An elegant, elegiac multigenerational saga. . . . Almost mythic in its ambition, somewhere between Oates and Updike country, and thoroughly satisfying."
-Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"In clean, authoritative prose, Haigh uncannily injects new life into an era too often entombed by nostalgia."
-Entertainment Weekly
"Terrific."
-Harlan Coben, The Birmingham News
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