The HOLLOW GROUND: A Novel - Hardcover

Harnett, Natalie S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250041988 ISBN 13: 9781250041982

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2014

Synopsis

Winner of the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year Award in Fiction
Winner of the John Gardner Fiction Book Award
Longlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award

We walk on fire or air, so Daddy liked to say. Basement floors too hot to touch. Steaming green lawns in the dead of winter. Sinkholes, quick and sudden, plunging open at your feet.

The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced eleven-year-old Brigid Howley and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and the black lung stricken Gramp. Tragedy is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Molly Maguires. The weight of this legacy rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandoned bootleg mine shaft. In the aftermath, decades-old secrets threaten to prove just as dangerous to the Howleys as the burning, hollow ground beneath their feet.

Inspired by real-life events in Centralia and Carbondale, where devastating coal mine fires irrevocably changed the lives of residents, The Hollow Ground is an extraordinary debut with an atmospheric, voice-driven narrative and an indelible sense of place. Lovers of literary fiction will find in Harnett's young, determined protagonist a character as heartbreakingly captivating as any in contemporary literature.

About this title

About the Author

NATALIE S. HARNETT is an MFA graduate of Columbia. She has been awarded an Edward Albee Fellowship, a Summer Literary Seminars Fellowship, and a Vermont Studio Center Writer's Grant, and was a finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction. Harnett has been published in The New York Times, The Madison Review and The MacGuffin. She lives on Long Island with her husband and toddler.

Reviews

For young Brigid Howley and her Irish American family, life in their small Pennsylvania town is hell on earth. Precariously poised atop rampaging underground coal-mine fires, their home is at the constant mercy of elements that rage below the surface. It’s an apt metaphor for the tempest that also brews within Brigid’s home. Her father, Adrian, can’t hold down a job since a mining disaster claimed the life of his brother, his parents’ favored son, Frank. Brigid’s mother, Dolores, is embittered by the poverty they can never escape. When yet another coal fire claims their home, they are forced to move in with Adrian’s parents, who make no secret of the disdain they feel for their surviving son’s family. How much longer can the miasma simmering underground mask the deeply held secrets dividing the cursed Howley family? Or will it take another tragedy before answers are finally brought to light? Harnett’s deeply atmospheric historical novel of the harsh old mining life captures the despair of a family at the mercy of the earth’s elements and their own worst impulses. --Carol Haggas

Edition details

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1250041988
• ISBN 13: 9781250041982
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320