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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 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 has written a powerful novel about the unionization of the mills in Gastonia, North Carolina. It is deeply felt and incredibly moving — a major work."—Lee Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Girls and Silver Alert
"This beautiful, deeply affecting novel performs the twin miracles of making another time as vivid as our own and laying bare the shocking conditions and extraordinary courage of two women caught up in the deadly North Carolina textile strikes of the 1920s and 1930s. As indelible as their struggles are, Lena and Rae will stay with me for the quiet poetry of their everyday lives, rendered exquisitely by the profoundly talented Kim Church."—Ann Packer, author of Some Bright Nowhere
"In her extraordinary new novel, Lena and Rae, Kim Church not only chronicles the lives of two memorable women but also provides a compelling and often terrifying account of North Carolina textile mill communities during the early 1900s through the Depression. In the midst of hardship and survival, there is a refrain in the novel, 'this is what love is'— a definition that shifts and changes with circumstance over the years, as does knowledge about loyalty and happiness and grief. The fluidity of time so beautifully captured is reason enough to read this novel, but that’s just the beginning. This is a work filled with rich rewards."—Jill McCorkle, author of Hieroglyphics and Old Crimes
"What a gorgeous, timely, and electrifying book this is. Kim Church’s lyricism will draw you in, and the story she tells will make your hair stand on end. Set mostly between the world wars, Lena and Rae explores the lives of two women born on the same day on neighboring farms, who travel to work in textile mills, where they are caught up in the violence of the mill owners’ response to labor strikes. The stark portrayal of working conditions in the mills feels heartbreakingly current, but it is the poetry of the language and the heroism of Lena and Rae that make this novel the masterpiece it is. I couldn’t put it down."—Abigail DeWitt, author of News of Our Loved Ones
Kim Church’s debut novel Byrd won the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, was a Chautauqua Prize finalist and an IPPY medalist, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the SIBA Book Award. Her short work appears in The Sun Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Shenandoah (Pushcart Prize nominee), The Great Books Foundation Short Story Omnibus, and other publications. A native of Lexington, North Carolina, she lives in Raleigh with her husband, artist Anthony Ulinski.