Told through a cast of characters whose lives are increasingly bound by the opposing interests that underpin the national debate, Heat and Light depicts a community blessed and cursed by its natural resources. Meanwhile his neighbors, organic dairy farmers Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling-until a passionate environmental activist disrupts their lives. He doesn’t count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother’s skepticism or the paranoia of his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter. To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Fueled by the energy released in her native state, it more than earns the symbolism of its title.īob Hoover is the retired book editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.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.įorty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. This is an angry book from Haigh, uncharacteristically harsh in her language and view of human nature.

The novelist adds the damage caused by the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident in central Pennsylvania to the list of those hurt in the pursuit of heat and light in the Keystone State, where its exploitation began with the oil boom after the Civil War. As one character thinks, 'It was hard to keep track of other people's suffering' as the energy boom proves too successful for its own good. Her wide-ranging cast of characters, from a driller from Texas to a delicate Bakerton child, all pay a heavy price in damaged relationships and health.

Haigh taps into this economic boom and bust era with the fervor of a native shocked by fracking's toll on the environment and inhabitants she treasures. Several years ago, the promise of prosperity from a new way to extract natural gas gripped the impoverished western part of the state, complete with its own vocabulary of new words such as 'fracking' and 'Marcellus Shale.' Landmen swarmed over the farms and woods to sign drilling leases with landowners who were promised big money as the gas freed by the fracking process would rule the energy market.

This is the region where she grew up among the played-out mines. Jennifer Haigh's sixth novel returns to fictional Bakerton, the setting for her second book, 'Baker Towers,' a story of life and death in Pennsylvania's soft-coal country.

Heat and light haigh