Holding the Line

Author: Barbara Kingsolver

Regional & national history | 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000

Published on 10^th October 2024 by Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 320 pages
216mm x 135mm | 0g

AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOWFrom the multi-million copy bestselling author Demon Copperhead: a true story of female-led resilience during the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 - now available for the first time in the UK.

'[Kingsolver] means to save us by telling us stories . . . She comes closer than anyone else I know.' ANNE PATCHETT'Clear and emotional . . . This is a report from the trenches of where the political meets the personal.' JOHN SAYLESIt was the summer of 1983. Barbara Kingsolver had a day job as a scientific writer spends her weekends cutting her teeth as a freelance journalist when she landed an assignment. Her mission: was to cover the Phelps Dodge mine strike.

Over the year that followed Kingsolver stood with those miners and their families, increasingly engaged and heartbroken. She recorded stories of striking miners and their stunningly courageous wives, sisters and daughters. She saw rights she'd taken for granted denied to people she had learned to care about, as they cried out to a wide world that either refused to believe what was happening to them, or didn't care, or simply could not know.

This book is the true story of the families who held the line, and of Kingsolver's commitment to tell the story of the women and girls who discovered themselves in their fight to keep their families from destitution. It is a story about the sparks that fly when the flint of force strikes against human mettle.

FROM THE WINNER OF THE PULITZER AND WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023