Zorrie by Laird Hunt

The National Book Award short list this year has a number of great books to choose from, and this is one of them. It is a short story about people living lives of quiet desperation. Zorrie Underwood has a very hard childhood, and then it gets worse. She is orphaned and penniless at 21, she leaves her Indiana town and finds employment at the Radium Dial Company. She is told that painting numbers on clocks with luminous, glow-in-the-dark paint is vital to the war effort. The girls doing the work, however, are unaware that the dull yellow powder in which they dip their brushes — whose bristles they then shape into a tip with their lips — is lethal. We follow what happens to those who stay, but Zorrie returns to Indiana to live among the silent but hardworking folks she knows. It is a mournful and yet entirely recognizable story that is told with a poet's brevity and eye for details. Just beautiful