This moving novel teases us with the question of what Dickens' Pip might have been like if he had grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues that galvanized the world in those decades: racial injustice, a war abroad, women's and gay rights, class struggle. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer's niece and nephew―these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris―all before returning home to confront his life's many expectations and surprises. Furnace Creek effortlessly combines elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery plot. Written with a natural storyteller's gift of imagination, it leaps the frame of Dickens' masterpiece to capture the emotional intensity of characters whose lives will haunt the reader beyond the page.

Our all-time bestselling title, this classic and powerful novel spanning three generations of a Slovak immigrant family has been adopted for course use in more than 250 colleges and universities nationwide. Out of This Furnace, is Thomas Bell's most compelling achievement. Its story of three generations of an immigrant Slovak family - the Dobrejcaks - still stands as a fresh and extraordinary accomplishment. The novel begins in the mid-1880s with the naive blundering career of Djuro Kracha. It tracks his arrival from the old country as he walked from New York to White Haven, his later migration to the steel mills of Braddock, and his eventual downfall through foolish financial speculations and an extramarital affair. The second generation is represented by Kracha's daughter, Mary, who married Mike Dobrejcak, a steel worker. Their decent lives, made desperate by the inhuman working conditions of the mills, were held together by the warm bonds of their family life, and Mike's political idealism set an example for the children. Dobie Dobrejcak, the third generation, came of age in the 1920s determined not to be sacrificed to the mills. His involvement in the successful unionization of the steel industry climaxed a half-century struggle to establish economic justice for the workers. Out of This Furnace is a document of ethnic heritage and of a violent and cruel period in our history, but it is also a superb story. The writing is strong and forthright, and the novel builds constantly to its triumphantly human conclusion.

When fourteen-year-old Alex is framed for murder, he becomes an inmate in the Furnace Penitentiary, where brutal inmates and sadistic guards reign, boys who disappear in the middle of the night sometimes return weirdly altered, and escape might just be possible.