'Gilded Mountain' novel is a wild adventure through the mines, unions and racism of 1900s Colorado

Author Kate Manning's newest novel "Gilded Mountain" takes readers on a wild adventure back in the early 1990s in the wild, stunningly beautiful and brutally unforgiving mountains of Colorado, where poor miners toil in sub-zero weather extracting the world's most precious marble from caves renowned for their beauty and danger.

It's a place where the rich mine owners' annual budget for strawberries totals more than the workers' pay; where a local newspaper, run by women, dares to reveal injustice. It's also where a young French Canadian woman from Vermont hopes to find love but instead embarks on a life-long crusade for social justice — inspired in part by famed union organizer Mother Jones. The novel is steeped in historical truth and was inspired by a single sepia-tinted photograph.

Here & Now's Robin Young talks to Manning about the novel.

By Kate Manning

Excerpted from "Gilded Mountain" by Kate Manning. Copyright ©2022 Kate Manning. Published by Scribner. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.