Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike

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From 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 SAYLES

It was the summer of 1983. Barbara Kingsolver had a day job as a scientific writer spending weekends cutting her teeth as a freelance journalist when she landed an assignment at a constellation of small, strike-gripped mining towns strung out across southern Arizona. 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, 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.

Kingsolver recorded stories of striking miners and their stunningly courageous wives, sisters, daughters. Sometimes visiting them in jail, witnessing the outrageous injustices they suffered. She saw rights she’d taken for granted denied to people she had learned to care about.

This book is not precisely about the mine strike of 1983, and not at all about copper. It 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.

Made in Dagenham meets Erin Brockovich, this book is 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