Having won us over with the darkly lyrical A Land More Kind Than Home and This Dark Road to Mercy, best sellers and award winners both, Cash takes us South again as he draws inspiration from the life of Ella May Wiggins, a workers' rights activist murdered in 1929 Gastonia, NC. Ella May, who works for a pittance at the local textile mill to support her four children after her husband runs off, makes the fateful decision to join the union the mill's owners so angrily denounce as Bolshevism. Decades later, her daughter relates the awful consequences. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

This third novel from a promising young voice in Southern fiction (A Land More Kind Than Home) concerns a North Carolina woman's fight for workers' rights. By 1929, 28-year-old Ella May Wiggins has had four children, the eldest of whom watches the others while their mother works nights at American Mill No. 2 as a spinner, and a husband who disappeared shortly after a fifth child died in infancy. Hearing of a rally in nearby Gastonia advocating a minimum wage and a 40-hour workweek, Ella May sees no choice but to attend. When asked to speak about mill conditions, she instead delivers a moving song of her own creation, becoming the face of the union struggle—and a target for anti-Communists. As in his previous books, Cash uses various voices from different periods to tell his story, here including a mill owner, a train porter, and Ella May's elderly daughter reflecting on her mother's complicated legacy in 2005. He writes with earnestness and great sympathy but reveals the outcome early, taking the bite out of the story's climax. VERDICT Admirers of Ron Rash's Serena and its Appalachian setting will find much to like here. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/17.]—Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ

Ella May depends on her job at a North Carolina textile mill to support her four children, but when a union organizer approaches her, she decides to join the fight for better working conditions and better pay. Cash portrays the drama and anguish of the American labor movement through one woman's grueling fight for justice. (LJ 8/17)