You can find my most recent author interview over at Dead Darlings.
Anyone who has followed Jennifer Haigh’s writing career will be unsurprised to learn that her fifth and latest novel, Heat and Light, offers a gripping, cleverly constructed, deeply empathetic account of the shale gas boom’s effect on economically downtrodden Bakerton, PA, a fictionalized version of Haigh’s home town.
Following up on four critically-acclaimed novels, most recently Faith, and a short story collection centered on characters connected to Bakerton, Heat and Light documents the opportunities and costs of gas drilling through a remarkably even-handed array of land-owners, town residents, drillers, and environmentalists.
According to Joshua Ferris, Heat and Light “works on a wide canvas and contains, before the final curtain closes, all the pleasures of the nineteenth-century social novel, but with a conspicuous lack of easy moralizing.” Writing in The New York Times, Janet Maslin describes Haigh’s work as “gripping, real and totally immersive, akin to that of writers as different as Richard Price, Richard Ford and Richard Russo.”
Jennifer took time out recently to speak with Dead Darlings about her newest release.