2023 IPNE Award Finalist, Genre Fiction

With an engaging cast of characters, Granite Kingdom is a complex yet balanced look at the granite industry and newspaper business in rural Vermont in the early 1900s.

It is 1910, and the northern Vermont village Granite Junction is the nation's largest supplier of finished granite for construction. Newspaper reporter Dan Strickland, a stonecutter's son who hopes to find the right wife and climb the social ladder, finds himself caught between the village's two big granite producers, George Rutherford and Ernest Wheeler. Several fatal industrial accidents prompt Rutherford to ask Dan to look for anarchist saboteurs, while Bob Blackstone, Wheeler's right-hand man, bullies Dan for working for the paper that supports their competitor. Despite the prosperity at the top, almost everyone in the village struggles to attain economic security; some fear ending up at the poor farm. Although Dan triumphs in the end, it is not in the way he had imagined.