Electric City: A Novel

"“In a company town, everything wore The Company insignia. ‘Live better electrically!’ the slogan said. Everyone believed it.” Elizabeth Rosner’s poetic and nuanced historical novel centers on Thomas Edison’s power company in upstate New York. She weaves together stories of mathematical genius Charles Steinmetz, who came via Ellis Island in 1888 and was known as the man who caught lightning in a bottle, and Native Americans along the Hudson and Mohawk rivers who watched the changes. And she tops that with a complex love triangle in a new generation, disrupted by the social upheaval of the 1960s."