Beyond Heartache - Comfort & Hope for Hurting People

The bestselling author of Faith and The Condition returns with a collection of unforgettable short stories inspired by a Pennsylvania coal-mining town and the people who call it home.

When her iconic novel Baker Towers was published in 2005, it was hailed as a modern classic—"compassionate and powerful . . . a song of praise for a too-little-praised part of America, for the working families whose toils and constancy have done so much to make the country great" (Chicago Tribune). Its young author, Jennifer Haigh, was "an expert natural storyteller with an acute sense of her characters' humanity" (New York Times).

Now, in this collection of interconnected short stories, Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town rocked by decades of painful transition. From its heyday during two world wars through its slow decline, Bakerton is a town that refuses to give up gracefully, binding—sometimes cruelly—succeeding generations to the place that made them. A young woman glimpses a world both strange and familiar when she becomes a live-in maid for a Jewish family in New York City. A long-absent brother makes a sudden and tragic homecoming. A solitary middle-aged woman tastes unexpected love when a young man returns to town. With a revolving cast of characters—many familiar to fans of Baker Towers—these stories explore how our roots, the families and places in which we are raised, shape the people we eventually become.

News from Heaven looks unflinchingly at the conflicting human desires for escape and for connection, and explores the enduring hold of home.

As humans we incarnate and evolve through our experiences. We become independent beings capable of willing, feeling and thinking. We can interact, make decisions, judge and find our own truth, identity and uniqueness. But how and why do we do this?

We can compare our self creation to making a cake. The basic ingredients for the making of a cake are the same, but they are also always different. The flour may be milled from wheat grown in different parts of the world, the eggs may be laid by different hens and the butter made from milk taken from different cows. These ingredients can be compared to our, inheritance - our start in life - our genetic make up, parents, culture etc. where there is always variation in color, type, size etc.

How the ingredients are put together has a profound affect on the final result. The cook, making a cake, can be likened to our experiencing and all the information that we sense and take in to mix together. Baking the cake is like our processing when we program our experiences to create our willing, feeling and thinking. The result is ourselves - just like a cake, which we can eat, throw away or leave to go mouldy. We can enjoy or dislike the result. This is us, our creation to be as we will.

Our autobiography is about our evolution and how we sense and program ourselves. How we develop our willing, feeling and thinking to create our soul. This process is unique to human life and enables us to become conscious of the most important part of our being. It is the reason for our existence - to be consciousness of spirit. We can only achieve this through creating ourselves.