Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry, and in debt, unable to feed and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all....

One of the most versatile and influential figures in twentieth-century literature, D.H. Lawrence was a master craftsman and profound thinker whose celebration of sexuality in an over-intellectualized world opened the door to that topic for countless writers after him. Perhaps his finest novel, Women in Love (1920) continues the story of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, who first appeared in Lawrence's novel The Rainbow (1915). The story contrasts...

When Lizzie Holroyd falls in love with another man, she wishes her boorish husband dead, a wish that comes horribly true.

Rose is a wonderfully rich and intricate novel set in nineteenth-century Wigan, a town located in the coal country of Lancashire.  Its protagonist, Jonathan Blair, is a mining engineer who has been chased out of Africa for "stealing" from the missionaries' Bible Fund in order to pay off the porter of his expedition into the interior of the Gold Coast; he is now down and out in London.
Blair's employer, Bishop Hannay, promises...

Joining the household staff of Houston Lamont, baronial owner of the chief industry of Blackwell, Scotland, working-class beauty Mirrin Stalker is soon caught between loyalty to her labour-leader father and passionate love for the married Lamont.

Chronicles the 1973 Harlan County, Kentucky coal miners' strike against the operators of the Brookside mine and the Duke Power Company, which resulted from the company's refusal to honor the national contract of the United Mine Workers of America when the miners joined the union.

A young doctor in a Welsh mining village runs up against the medical establishment when he tries to explore the cause of a cough disabling miners; he abandons his humanitarian goals for a London practice.

"Yonnondio follows the heartbreaking path of the Holbrook family in the late 1920s and the Great Depression as they move from the coal mines of Wyoming to a tenant farm in Western Nebraska, ending up finally on the killing floors of the slaughterhouses and in the wretched neighborhoods of the poor in Omaha, Nebraska. Mazie, the oldest daughter in the growing family of Jim and Anna Holbrook, tells the story of the family's desire for a better life--Anna's...