Northern Lights, Empty Pockets

Sarah Mitchell arrives on Minnesota's Iron Range with nothing but her nine-year-old daughter and whatever was in the Honda. Fleeing a collapsed marriage in the suburbs, she takes the only job she can — night custodian at the regional hospital — and moves into Section 8 housing in a town that's been losing people and purpose since the mines went quiet. But in the church basements and break rooms of the Range, among retired miners with ruined lungs and neighbors who share what little they have, Sarah discovers a community that survives not on prosperity but on stubbornness, generosity, and the unspoken agreements between people who understand what it means to go without. As the seasons turn from frozen February to brief summer and back toward the long dark, she is drawn into a struggle to protect the people around her — and that the life she never planned may be the one she was always meant to build. Read more