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Celebrated Southern author Kim Church delivers a bittersweet story of sisterhood set during the violent labor strikes in North Carolina’s textile mills, perfect for fans of Kristin Hannah and Kim Michele Richardson
Born on the same day in neighboring farmhouses in Burke County, North Carolina, Lena and Rae are stark opposites and inseparable friends. Lena, the daughter of scratch farmers, learns early what it is to work. Rae, with her mother’s sweet voice and wild beauty, seems born to shine. After her mother’s death, Rae is taken in and raised as Lena’s sister, bringing the two girls only a heartbeat apart.
When teenage Lena leaves the farm for work in the cotton mills, Rae follows, wanting the independence and stability out of reach for so many women. But that stability is fleeting. When the mill’s owners impose a “stretch-out”—strict efficiency measures that push workers to their breaking point—strikes erupt, sparking a brutal class war and setting Lena and Rae on opposite sides of the picket line.
Part fictional retelling of the 1929 strike at Gastonia’s Loray Mill and the General Textile Strike of 1934, part intimate family saga, Lena and Rae weaves a deft, lyrical story of work and faith, love and struggle, and above all, the ties of sisterhood that endure after heartbreak.
Kim Church is the author of Byrd, winner of the Crook’s Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the South. Her stories, poems, and essays have appeared in the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward, Shenandoah, Painted Bride Quarterly, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband, artist Anthony Ulinski, in Raleigh, North Carolina.