Tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease, Ward embarks on a search to rediscover his grandmother, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a 100 years earlier.

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and ...

Presents an account of the author's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s. It provides descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment.

A masterful story of a young girl plucked from her village by the king's ministers in order to learn the skills of a princess. What becomes a familiar story, quickly becomes a dark, powerful allegory of issues being faced by young women

Coal has transformed societies, shaped the fate of nations, launched empires, and triggered wars. It fuelled the Industrial Revolution in Britain, propelling the rise of a small rural kingdom into the greatest commercial empire in the world. This book explores the profound role coal has played in human history and continues to play in the world.

Growing up in a mining community in rural South Wales, Huw Morgan is taught many harsh lessons. Looking back, where difficult days are faced with courage and the valleys swell with the sound of Welsh voices, it becomes clear that there is nowhere so green as the landscape of his own memory.

Native peoples throughout the globe are facing extinction due to the greed of mining and oil companies. Their plight sounds the alarm to all those concerned about the prospect of global warming, genocide and eco-disasters. These stories show how resource extraction is being limited.

Kit has just moved to Stoneygate with his family, to live with his ageing grandfather who is gradually succumbing to Alzheimer's Disease. Stoneygate is an insular place, scarred by its mining history - by the danger and death it has brought them. Where the coal mine used to be there is now a wilderness.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'March' and 'People of the Book'. A young woman's struggle to save her family and her soul during the extraordinary year of 1666, when plague suddenly struck a small Derbyshire village.

A wonderful novel about unravelling a young woman's secret past.

A brooding, compelling, fugitive-on-the-run story Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Winner of the International Association of Crime Writers Dashiell Hammett Prize, Longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

This study takes a fresh look into the lives of families living in the coal camps of southern Colorado between 1890 and the Great Depression. Historian Rick J. Clyne examines the experiences of the men, women, and children who lived and worked in these isolated, company-dominated towns. With the dangerous nature of mining coal a daily reality, the fear of death and injury was pervasive -- not ...

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this work moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, and Mexico during the revolution.

When Masterharper Zist takes over as Harper for Natalon's coal-mining camp, he takes with him his apprentice, the orphaned Pellar, and Pellar's fire-lizard Chitter. Pellar has become a gifted tracker and Zist gives him his own mission - to find out if the thefts of coal are the work of the criminals condemned to a life of wandering and hardship.

Jennifer Haigh's second novel is an intimate portrait of love and family, which will appeal to fans of Anne Tyler and Carol Shields.

Alexander MacDonald tells the story of his family from the vantage point of the 1980s. In 1779, driven from his home, Calum MacDonald sets sail from the Scottish Highlands for Canada. Reaching the land of trees , he settles his extensive family until they become a separate Nova Scotian clan.