Faber brings Barbara Kingsolver's Holding the Line to the UK for the first time

Faber has acquired Barbara Kingsolver’s Holding the Line, a book based on the true story of "female-led resilience" during the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, which the author first wrote 40 years ago. Described as "Made in Dagenham" meets "Erin Brockovich", Holding the Line is "about the sparks that fly when the flint of force strikes against human mettle", the synopsis says. 

Fiction associate publisher Louisa Joyner acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding audio, from David Grossman. Faber will publish the book in the UK for the first time in October 2024.

"It was the summer of 1983," the synopsis says. "Barbara Kingsolver had a day job as a scientific writer, spending weekends cutting her teeth as a freelance journalist, when she landed an assignment at a constellation of small, strike-gripped mining towns strung out across southern Arizona. Her mission was to cover the Phelps Dodge [copper] mine strike."

The publisher continued: "Over the year that followed, Barbara stood with those miners and their families, increasingly engaged and heartbroken, as they cried out to a wide world that either refused to believe what was happening to them, or didn’t care, or simply could not know.

"Barbara Kingsolver recorded stories of striking miners and their stunningly courageous wives, sisters [and] daughters, sometimes visiting them in jail, witnessing the outrageous injustices they suffered. She saw rights she’d taken for granted denied to people she had learnt to care about.

"This book is not precisely about the mine strike of 1983, and not at all about copper. It is the true story of the families who held the line, and of Barbara Kingsolver’s commitment to tell the story of the women and girls who discovered themselves in their fight to keep their families from destitution."

The Demon Copperhead author, who last year won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, said: "I’m excited to launch this book into the UK, because it feels as necessary to me now as it did when I was writing it 40 years ago. The unfair odds of a fight between big capital and organised labour; the underestimated power of women; the resistance we can build when we have to, out of pure ingenuity, community and the force of will – I’d love to think these stories have grown obsolete, but they haven’t. I hope they can kindle some hope for a new generation as we carry on."   

Joyner added: "Working with Barbara Kingsolver was a career aspiration, and is a personal and professional highlight, so it’s hard to put into words how it felt to discover that her very first work, this utterly glorious, generous, propulsive, profound piece of non-fiction existed and had not – ever – been published in the UK. Signature Kingsolver in its peerless storytelling and piercing political engagement, it is eerily prescient. It is a powerful gift from Barbara Kingsolver’s younger self to us all in these troubling times."