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William Morrow
January 2005
352 pages
ISBN: 0060509414
Hardcover
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Women's Fiction
Bakerton is a company town built on coal, a town of church
festivals and ethnic neighborhoods, hunters' breakfasts and
firemen's parades. Its children are raised in company houses
-- three rooms upstairs, three rooms downstairs. Its ball
club leads the coal company league. The twelve Baker mines
offer good union jobs, and the looming black piles of mine
dirt don't bother anyone. Called Baker Towers, they are
local landmarks, clear evidence that the mines are booming.
Baker Towers mean good wages and meat on the table, two
weeks' paid vacation and presents under the Christmas tree. The mines were not named for Bakerton; Bakerton was named
for the mines. This is an important distinction. It explains
the order of things. Born and raised on Bakerton's Polish Hill, the five Novak
children come of age during wartime, a thrilling era when
the world seems on the verge of changing forever. The
oldest, Georgie, serves on a minesweeper in the South
Pacific and glimpses life beyond Bakerton, a promising
future he is determined to secure at all costs. His sister
Dorothy, a fragile beauty, takes a job in Washington, D.C.,
and finds she is unprepared for city life. Brilliant Joyce
longs to devote herself to something of consequence but
instead becomes the family's keystone, bitterly aware of the
opportunities she might have had elsewhere. Sandy sails
through life on looks and charm, and Lucy, the volatile
baby, devours the family's attention and develops a
bottomless appetite for love. 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
the men and women we now call the Greatest Generation. This
is a feat of imagination from an extraordinary new voice in
American fiction, a writer of enormous power and skill.
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