When their hard-drinking, but loving, father dies in a car accident, teenage brothers Kyle and Klint Hayes face a bleak prospect: leaving their Pennsylvania hometown for an uncertain life in Arizona with the mother who ran out on them years ago. But in a strange twist of fate, their town’s matriarch, an eccentric, wealthy old woman whose family once owned the county coal mines, hears the boys’ story. Candace Jack doesn’t have an...

Rose is a wonderfully rich and intricate novel set in nineteenth-century Wigan, a town located in the coal country of Lancashire.  Its protagonist, Jonathan Blair, is a mining engineer who has been chased out of Africa for "stealing" from the missionaries' Bible Fund in order to pay off the porter of his expedition into the interior of the Gold Coast; he is now down and out in London.
Blair's employer, Bishop Hannay, promises...

Two miles into the earth, nine Appalachian miners struggle to survive after a methane explosion leaves them with one hour of oxygen.

During the Second Napoleonic Empire, Etienne Lantier finds employment as a coal miner in the northern French town of Montsou. He immediately encounters misery and degradation in the appalling conditions of the mine. There he meets men as unscrupulous as Chaval and, conversely, as generous as Maheu. In fact, a whole range of suffering humanity, laboring under the curse of capitalism.

"The town of Lota, Chile, 1897 is the setting that reflects a history of human and social changes. In the depths of the biggest coal mine in the world, a grand rebellion develops in the heart of a man. While the aristocratic family of Cousiño Goyenechea dreams of progress, the coal miners awaken in their search for diginity"--Container.

"After his mother is killed, four-year-old Clay Sizemore finds himself alone in a small Appalachian mining town. At first, unsure of Free Creek, he slowly learns to lean on its residents as family. There's Aunt Easter, who is always filled with a sense of foreboding, bound to her faith above all ; quiltmaking Uncle Paul; untamable Evangeline ; and Alma, the fiddler whose song wends it way into Clay's heart. Together, they help Clay fashion a quilt...

Examines the economic and social plight of West Virginia coal miners. Focuses on the environmental despoilation caused by mining that inhabitants of West Virginia's coal county are forced to endure.

The story of Loretta Lynn, who rose from the poverty-stricken Appalachian area to become one of the biggest country singers of all time.

Eleven-year-old miner's son Billy Elliot is on his way to boxing lessons when he stumbles upon a ballet class. Billy secretly joins the class, knowing that his blue-collar family would never understand.