We walk on fire or air, so Daddy liked to say. Basement floors too hot to touch. Steaming green lawns in the dead of winter. Sinkholes, quick and sudden, plunging open at your feet.

The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced eleven-year-old Brigid Howley and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and the black lung stricken Gramp. Tragedy is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Molly Maguires. The weight of this legacy rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandoned bootleg mine shaft. In the aftermath, decades-old secrets threaten to prove just as dangerous to the Howleys as the burning, hollow ground beneath their feet.

Inspired by real-life events in Centralia and Carbondale, where devastating coal mine fires irrevocably changed the lives of residents, The Hollow Ground is an extraordinary debut with an atmospheric, voice-driven narrative and an indelible sense of place. Lovers of literary fiction will find in Harnett's young, determined protagonist a character as heartbreakingly captivating as any in contemporary literature.

• We started tracking this book on April 27, 2014.
• This book was $10.67 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 34 times in the past 3,862 days.
• The current price of this book is $2.99 last checked 5 hours ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past 90 days.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $0.75.
• The lowest price to date was $0.75 last reached on June 9, 2024.
• This book has been $0.75 one time since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $13.49 last reached on July 7, 2024.
• This book has been $13.49 3 times since we started tracking it.

• Literature & Fiction
• Literature & FictionHistorical FictionIrish

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 333 Pages
• File Size: 2,899 KB