News from Heaven audiobook

The news is not always good. Jennifer Haigh, clearly mining a favorite seam, manages to hit the motherlode again in her new tales of Bakerton, PA. Her 2005 novel, Baker Towers, painted a three-decade portrait of the small mining town, from 1944 into the 1970s, focusing on the lives of its residents, and most particularly, the five siblings of her fictional Novak family. In returning to Bakerton, Haigh brings back several of the characters from her earlier work, completing some unfinished stories of the family, and expanding her scope as well. There are plenty of faces, even beyond those of the Novaks, that will be familiar to readers of the earlier book. In News From Heaven Jennifer Haigh demonstrates once more the immense talent for which she has rightfully come to be known. Jennifer Haigh - image from The Globe and MailShe has not been idle in the eight years since she introduced Bakerton, PA to the world. In 2008, The Condition , was released, an excellent a multi-generational family drama set in New England. In 2011, she produced the exquisite Faith, about a priest accused of sexually abusing a child. In that novel and in other work she showed a power that put her at the top level of contemporary fiction writers, and she just keeps on getting better. But, apparently, Haigh had been puttering with Bakerton tales ever since Baker Towers came out.I didn’t, for a long time, imagine publishing them as a collection. I wrote them one at a time, in between novels or drafts of novels. And after about ten years of this, I realized that they belonged together in a book. So in a way, despite moving from Pennsylvania to the Boston area, one could say that in News from Heaven, Jennifer Haigh returns to Bakerton. But in a very real sense she never left.This is a book about longing, loneliness, about secrets, about wanting to flee the stifling confines not just of small town life but of responsibility and living with one’s choices. Maybe about pleading with fate. Yet it is also about the pull that our homes can have on our hearts. The stories are filled with yearnings, some met, many not. Disappointment shuffles through these stories. Secrets are revealed, often to dark effect. These are stories about change, in the world and in her characters. …good fiction always begins with complex, well-developed characters, and to write those characters I have to know where they came from. I imagine them as children, their fears and frustrations, the rooms where they slept at night, and I find it all so interesting that I have to write about it. I have come to accept that — in my hands, anyway — every story becomes a family story. As with Baker Towers, most of the action in the book takes place in Bakerton, with a few forays beyond, and the great majority of her characters are women. There are ten stories in the collection. All of them will make you feel. Four of the first five look upward, in their titles at least, while the latter five seem to look down. There are moments of awakening, moments of glorious freedom and possibility that shine through this sooty, declining place, lives that find meaning, whether real or faux, whether passing or permanent. But it seems that for most of the inhabitants, whether they remain in Bakerton or have sought greener pastures elsewhere, the news from on high is that they have to get by with what they can and not look for a paradise on earth. That said, Haigh’s writing is heaven-sent, her ability to portray real, breathing people is celestial and her talent for portraying place is rapturous.It is not necessary to have read Baker Towers in order to appreciate the strength of the writing on display here, but it certainly helps to have done so in order to get the fullest picture of her players. ===============================THE STORIESBeast and Birds opens the collection in the past. Sixteen-year-old Annie Lubicki is engaged to work in the household of an Upper West Side Manhattan Jewish family in the 1930s. The family has a son whose destiny it is to become a scholar. We are given a servant’s eye look at life in NYC as Annie experiences it on her first time away from home. On a weekend while the adults are away, Annie is charged with caring for the young man. He is unwell and cannot accompany his parents on their trip. He and Annie have developed a relationship that is nothing but sweet. There are many words for what she’d felt as she watched him sleep, many words in many languages, but the one she knows is longing Did they or didn’t they?In Something Sweet, an ironic title, Haigh brings back teacher Viola Peale from BT. She is much taken with a student, a boy who has a natural way with girls, is a gifted salesman who also demonstrates a flair for decoration. He offers her a lemon drop. “It’s nice to have something sweet,” he says. Of course he incurs the wrath of those maybe not so smooth. During the summer visit of a young relation Viola is smitten with a hunky second cousin who is very wrong for her--In a trance of longing, Viola sat on the grass, hugging her knees to her chest--and her desire is harshly rewarded. The young student knows he will never be accepted in the town and looks for a way out. The sweetness here is of the bitter variety.In Broken Star young Regina has a magical month in the summer of 1974, when her cool Aunt Melanie comes to stay with the family for a spell, and provides a wonderful assist during a time of growth and change. Gina thrives with Melanie’s encouragement but still has concerns about life, and her future, a girl born to a farming family, who is not all that interested in the land, a girl who fears getting stuck. My uncles…were like all the men I knew then, soybean and dairy farmers who spoke rarely and then mainly about the weather. Yet unlikely as it seemed, I accepted that these men had the power to transform. My aunts had been pretty, lively girls—one stubborn, one mischievous, one coquettish, according to my mother—though somehow all three had matured into exactly the same woman: plump, cheerful, adept at pie making and counted cross-stitch, smelling of vanilla and Rose Milk hand lotion. That I would someday become that same woman terrified me. My only greater fear was that nobody would choose me, and I would become nothing.Years later, after marrying, living abroad and having written a book, Regina learns a tragic secret about her aunt, and the cost of her own separateness. A Place in the Sun continues the unfinished story of Sandy Novak from BT. Despite his charm, beauty and certain skills, Sandy has never managed to get or stay ahead. He seems always on the run and has a gambling compulsion. Still, he and his sister, Joyce, maintain some sort of a connection, even if that usually means her sending him money. Trying to straighten up he takes a job at a diner in North HollywoodShe had hired him off the street. Bleary, hungover, he’d wandered in for breakfast after an all-night card game. A sign in the window said HELP WANTED. Can you cook? Vera Gold asked.He looked down at his greasy plate. Better than this? Sure. You bet. It is not long before Sandy and statuesque, red-headed Vera are an item, to the chagrin of Vera’s much older husband. Of course this complicates Sandy’s relationship with a young Canadian cutie, who is looking for more from him that he is interested in giving.”That’s where I used to work,” he said, pointing. The familiar sign filled him with an old longing, the looping S with its tall graceful curves The Sands A PLACE IN THE SUN“Is that where we’re going?”For a moment he was tempted. The town had a short memory, and seven years had passed. Still he wouldn’t chance it. He’d been known there, known and recognized. Sandy from the Sands. It wasn’t worth the risk.And across it all he ponders his family back east, and the odds of life taking a positive turn.To The Stars looks at the town’s reaction to Sandy’s passing, with particular focus on Joyce, and her feelings about her own choices. Sandy was once a chauffeur to the stars but never managed to become a star himself. She is thinking not of his death but of that earlier departure, his disappearance like a magic trick, as dizzying and complete. His manic and determined flight from Bakerton, from the family, from her…and yet Joyce could never leave them [her family], run off to California or to Africa, as her younger siblings have done. Freedom is, to her, unimaginable, as exotic as walking on the moon. Thrift introduces Agnes Lubicki, a nurse who has lived her life in service to others and found herself with no way to have anything for herself. Until a man enters her life, and Agnes gives up everything for him. Is this what she’d been saving for?In Favorite Son, Mitch Stanek, a studly jock, had been expected to coast to a career in professional sports. But something is amiss when he goes away to college on a full scholarship. We see him, back in Bakerton, married with kids, and out of work when Mine #11 shuts down, putting 900 out of work. Joyce Novak’s daughter, Rebecca, narrates the tale, and has special knowledge about Mitch, that tells us whether he was destined for fame, or not. It is in this story that we get the quote that births the collection’s title: The white flakes landed like news from heaven: notes from elsewhere, fallen from the stars.The Bottom of Things introduces Ray Wojick, 52, back in town for his parents’ 50th anniversary party, with his pregnant second wife. Ray is looking to get to the bottom of things, his ultimate impact on his late brother’s fate, how his father was able to raise him, when he married a woman with a three-year old, how Ray’s first marriage came to be and came to end, his alienation from his children from that marriage, and how to cope once he learns what he needs to know.Sunny Baker used to be a joyous kid, thus the name, but in What Remains we see what has become of her. When her parents were killed in a plane crash her life took a dark turn, and she never quite recovered. We see her through a series of relationships, each of which add more junk to her property and take a piece more out of what is left of her. The story is paralleled by the town wanting to attract construction of a new prison. Do the math.Finally, Desiderata closes the book with Joyce Novak mourning the death of her husband, and remembering her dead son, and how he was lost. It also tells the tale of an inspirational teacher and a husband who had married a woman who did not or could not love him enough.Review first posted - February 2013Publication dates----------January 29, 2013 - hardcover----------January 7, 2014 - trade paperbackThe trade paperback came out on January 7, 2014

Everyone knows a town like Bakerton. It’s that town you might have driven through – on your way from here to there -- where “the neighbors wanted nothing more from life than they already had: steady work, a new Chevy each year, weekends in front o the television drinking beer and watching ball.” It’s that town with a church and a bar on every corner. It’s been immortalized in classics like Our Town and Winesburg, Ohio. Jennifer Haigh’s genius is to cast her laser spotlight on the seemingly ordinary people of Bakerton to cull extraordinary stories of hope, regret, yearning, restlessness, and at times, fulfillment. In her series of interconnected stories, characters that might have lurked forever in the shadows reveal depth, pathos, and surprises.In the very first story, a teenage girl takes a position as a live-in maid for an upper-class Jewish family on New York’s tony upper West Side; it feels like a cultural displacement. An act of kindness is misinterpreted and her stay there is short. In another, Broken Star, another young girl meets her not-much-older Aunt Melanie whom she instantly connects with; later on, she inadvertently learns a shocking family secret that will forever change how she views herself.In yet another, A Place In The Sun, a 30-ish year old man named Sandy escapes the town but not the gravitating pull of going home: “The town he’d fled, where mines had killed has father; the bleak small-town life worse than jail, a prison from which no one escaped. And yet he had considered it: driving back east with his bride beside him…”Each portrait is lovingly rendered: a middle-age spinster who trusts her instincts against all odds and experiences love for the first time in her life…a one-time high-school football star who tastes the glory but harbors a secret that dooms him to eventual failure…a successful brother – dubbed “J.R” by the town after J.R. Ewing – who feels guilt about letting his younger brother fall through the cracks. News From Heaven redefines the word “home” and what it takes to define our place inside and outside of it.

I have one shelf on my many, many bookshelves devoted to my all-time favorite books. Jennifer Haigh's debut novel Mrs. Kimble holds a place of honor there. She is remarkable writer, and her last novel Faith just reaffirmed my belief that she is one of the best fiction writers out there.She recently published a short story collection, News From Heaven: The Bakerton Stories, set in different eras in the coal mining town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania. Some of the characters were featured in her previous novel, Baker Towers. Each of the ten stories is moving, and anyone who has lived in a small town with one major employer will recognize the people in these stories. Haigh's describes people in just a few sentences and you get them right away. Teenage Regina describes her mother this way in Broken Star:"She greeted all presents this way- you shouldn't have- no matter how worthy the occasion or how trifling the gift. It was a habit born of embarrassment. No gift- even one she'd always wished for- was worth drawing attention to herself."I feel like I know this woman because I know people just like her.She also has such a sense of place, as with this sentence from the same story:"Night was falling as we left the bus station, an amenity that, until then, I hadn't known the town possessed."There are many people who live lives in a small box, and even those who live in a large city may contain themselves to just a few blocks.There were a few stories that really moved me. A Place in the Sun is about Sandy Novak, one of the characters from Baker Towers. Sandy is handsome man who left Bakerton to head west. He ends up living hand-to-mouth, bartending here, working as short-order cook there. He sleeps with his boss' wife, then steals from the boss and takes off to Vegas with a younger woman. Life hasn't turned out the way he hoped, and he thinks he has one last chance for a big score.Sandy's story continues back in Bakerton in To The Stars, where Sandy's siblings Joyce, Dorothy and George are left to deal with the fallout Sandy leaves behind. We see the family dynamic in this encounter about Joyce:"She accepts condolences and prayers. It is her role, always: the public face of the family. Dorothy, whose backwardness is known and accepted, busies herself in the kitchen. George is nowhere to be found."Again, in just a few sentences we know so much about this family and each sibling's place in it.We see what happens to the high school football hero who can't make it in college in Favorite Son, which also has the best line in the book:"For a certain kind of teenager, a small town is a prison. For another, it is a stage." A lonely nurse meets a handsome younger man and her life changes in Thrift. What Remains tells the sad story of Sunny Baker, the last remaining descendant of the Baker family, the founders of the Bakerton.The story that moves me most is The Bottom of Things, which features Ray, someone who made it out of Bakerton and ended up with a good life in Houston. Ray reluctantly goes home for his parents 50th anniversary party, and feels guilty for what he left behind. His has no relationship with his sons since he divorced their mother years ago. His brother Kenny has never gotten over his time in Vietnam; it is this relationship that seems to hurt the most.News From Heaven is about family, relationships, loyalty, guilt, and the sacrifices people make. It's about the people who live in this decaying town and how that decay affects them. As I read this, I felt like I was peeking in the windows of these people's homes and watching them live their lives. The lyrical writing soars, and I wish I was reading this again for the first time. It's one of the best books so far in 2013.

Years ago, long before she became a gifted novelist, I worked with Jennifer Haigh. So when I stumbled across Mrs. Kimble, her first novel, in an airport book store years ago, I had to buy and read it. I've been reading everything she writes ever since. News From Heaven is a collection of short stories all about the same place: an imaginary coal mining town called Bakerton. If you read her novel Baker Towers, some of the characters will be familiar. If you didn't read it, this collection still stands on its own. I will admit that I usually struggle with short stories. There are just too many stopping points usually for me to finish a whole book of them. This collection, however, was different. Each story seemed progresses to the next. All of the characters know one another, so each new story adds a new perspective that helps you understand some of th stories that came before. Much like A Visit From the Goon Squad, I got a sense of the tragic nature of aging--what is lost, what is forgotten, and what changes. The book is tender in parts, sad in others. It's the kind of book that makes you think about your own relationships--about what is left unsaid, about opportunities missed. It was a joy to read.

Jennifer Haigh's first short story collection, News From Heaven, traces the slow decay of the fictional Pennsylvania coal-mining town of Bakerston, through 10 linked stories. Introduced to readers in her fine 2005 novel, Baker Towers, Bakerston was a typical mining town. In its heyday in the middle of the 20th Century, the Baker Brothers mines employed virtually every able-bodied male in the town and even built the workers’ cookie-cutter homes. The workers made good wages and the town grew into a tight-knit community where everybody knew everybody else’s business. Or so they thought. When an explosion toppled one of the mines and killed a number of the miners, the dramatic climax of Baker Towers, it rocked the town forever. By the time the 21st Century dawned the company had extracted every bit of coal it could and it closed the mines. Workers went on unemployment or moved South for new jobs, while some suffered worse fates, their lungs scarred by decades in the mines. While on one level the stories present a microcosm of the nation’s economic woes, their true power lies in the exploration of the inner lives of the families–bound by their daily struggles and the yearning for a better life. Haigh’s characters are a diverse lot, from the disturbed heir to the Baker fortune, living in squalor, to the restless son of the Novak clan, who leaves Bakerston far behind but can never quite escape its grip. Haigh brings these characters alive with a perceptiveness and eloquence. While the characters know intimate details about their fellow townspeople, there are long-held secrets, hidden mostly out of love. In “Beast and Bird,” the opening story, a Bakerston family sends its young Polish teen-ager to work as a live-in maid for a wealthy Jewish family in New York City, where everything is unfamiliar and nothing makes sense to her. “A Place in the Sun” and its twin story, “To the Stars,” focus on Sandy, the youngest of the Novak clan, who struggles to find a new life on the West Coast, but cannot outrun his demons. There are tender moments as well. In “Thrift,” 50-year-old Agnes Lubicki, destined to be an aging spinster, unexpectedly finds love with a much younger man. In “The Bottom of Things,” Ray Wojick returns home from Houston as a successful businessman to attend his parents’ 50th anniversary, triggering memories of his troubled brother’s death and his guilt over whether he could have prevented it. Haigh is the author of four critically-acclaimed novels. In addition to Baker Towers, her works include Mrs. Kimble, The Condition,and Faith.

When I found out that I'd won a free copy of this book from the Goodreads First Reads program, I was obviously excited. Then when I figured out it was the second book this author has written about Bakerton, Pennsylvania, I was afraid I'd be totally lost, since I've never read the first one. It turned out there was no cause for alarm, as the short stories in this book stand completely on their own. (I still do want to read the first book, Baker Towers, but only because I like the author's writing style and the characters she has created here.)The stories in this book are very good. In her writing style, Jennifer Haigh reminded me of Alice Munro, which is high praise coming from me, as Munro is one of my favorite short story writers. Both of them are able to give you a sense of a person's whole life in just a few pages by sketching a few well-chosen details and letting you fill in the rest. In subject matter, this book reminded me more of A Gravestone Made of Wheat by Will Weaver. Although Weaver writes about small agricultural towns in Minnesota and this book is set in a mining town in Pennsylvania, there's the same feeling of having two choices-- striking out on your own in the big outside world or living a small and unfulfilling life where you grew up. Haigh captures that dichotomy very well.

News From Heaven by Jennifer Haigh is a collection of interconnected short stories about Bakerton, Pa., and while the characters in these stories all have roots in that former coal-mining town, the town itself is a character — matter of fact, it is the character — that holds these stories together. Haigh has created a heartbreaking and hopeful story about the death and rebirth of a town and its people. As the founding members, the Bakers, brought glory and industry to the town that ensured its prosperity, they also have a hand in its decline.From WWI to the 1970s and 1990s, Haigh chronicles the rise and fall of a town tied closely to its founding family and the coal beneath its hills. By the end, readers will be as connected to Bakerton as they are to their own hometowns and families. From the coal hacked out of the mines to the black lungs carried by its resident miners, there is a deep sense of place and the people who inhabit it are as flawed and as memorable as the school teachers, mechanics, small business owners, and others of memory.Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2013/02/n...

I don't generally read short story collections, but I loved Faith (her last novel) that I was willing to give this a chance---and I am so glad I did. While this could technically be considered a sequel to Baker Towers, you don't need to have read that to enjoy this. (Although as a warning, I hadn't read that book and after reading this, I bought it because I want to spend more time with these people in this world.)Which is interesting, really, because these are mostly not happy stories. Bakerton is the kind of town that everyone wants to escape, but few people actually manage to get away. It's a small town with few opportunities and those opportunities are dwindling even more as the mines (which employ many of the residents) start to die off. Many of the stories are interconnected and so some of the characters pop up in several different stories (and each cameo was like randomly running into a friend).Highly recommended, even if you don't think you like short stories. Jennifer Haigh will prove you wrong.

I had enjoyed Haigh's previous novel, "Faith", so I thought I'd pick up her collection of short stories. BOTNS has declared this the "year of short stories" and I've been reading along with some of their recommendations. This collection felt more like a novel, similar to Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad." Separate stories but overlapping characters and a common setting, Bakerton, Pennsylvania. I have not read her 2005 novel, "Baker Towers" which is set in the same small coal town in Pennsylvania. I'll have to add this one to my reading list. Definitely recommended.