"Nayan Olak keeps seeing Helen Fletcher around town. She's returned with her teenage son to live in the run-down house at the end of the lane, and--though she's strangely guarded--Nayan can't help but be drawn to her. He hasn't risked love since losing his young family in a terrible accident twenty years earlier. In the wake of the tragedy, Nayan's labor union, long a cornerstone of his community, became the center of his life: a way for him to channel...

Jake and Rosa, two children, form an unlikely friendship as they try to survive and understand the 1912 Bread and Roses strike of mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Spindle City delves deep into the lives, loves, and fortunes of real and imagined mill owners, anarchists, and immigrants, from the Highlands mansions to the tenements of the Cogsworth slum, chronicling a mill town's -- and a generation's -- last days of glory.

Mary Barton, the daughter of disillusioned trade unionist, rejects her working-class lover Jem Wilson in the hope of marrying Henry Carson, the mill owner’s son, and making a better life for herself and her father. But when Henry is shot down in the street and Jem becomes the main suspect, Mary finds herself painfully torn between the two men. Through Mary’s dilemma, and the moving portrayal of her father, the embittered and courageous activist...