It was the summer of 1983. Barbara Kingsolver had a day job as a scientific writer spending weekends cutting her teeth as a freelance journalist when she landed an assignment. Her mission: was to cover the Phelps Dodge mine strike.

Over the year that followed Kingsolver stood with those miners and their families, increasingly engaged and heartbroken. She recorded stories of striking miners and their stunningly courageous wives, sisters and daughters. She saw rights she’d taken for granted denied to people she had learned to care about, 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.

This book is the true story of the families who held the line, and of Kingsolver’s commitment to tell the story of the women and girls who discovered themselves in their fight to keep their families from destitution.

It is a story about the sparks that fly when the flint of force strikes against human mettle.