Jennifer Haigh at Newtonville Books

Newtonville books is pleased to welcome Jennifer Haigh, author of the critically acclaimed novel, HEAT AND LIGHT, a deftly interwoven set of stories about a fictional town in Pennsylvania. 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.

“Ms. Haigh is an expertly nuanced storyteller long overdue for major attention. Her work is gripping, real and totally immersive, akin to that of writers as different as Richard Price, Richard Ford and Richard Russo…With this book, she moves one big step closer to being in their league.” — Janet Maslin, New York Times

“We finally have a novel – and a novelist – whose ambitions match the scale of this subject…a tour-de-force of multiple point-of-view narration…DeLillo-esque…Haigh’s achievement in this expansive, gripping novel is to delineate the ways in which we are all connected, for better and worse. — The Washington Post