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Mattie knows she's been accepted to study creative writing at Barnard College in New York, so she'll work as a maid at a fancy hotel in the Adirondacks over the summer, and the earnings will - if life allows it - pay for her college tuition. Mattie loves words more than anything: words she writes, words she remembers, words that provide her with a way to survive the cruel reality that surrounds her, words that often remain deeply embedded in her. And then, one day, a bundle of fateful words falls into her hands - a collection of letters entrusted to her by a young woman named Grace Brown, just before she goes on a boat trip on which she drowns.

Because the year is 1906, and the mysterious death of Grace Brown is the same true event that inspired Theodore Dreiser to write "An American Tragedy", made into the film "A Place in the Sun". In "Northern Lights," Jennifer Donnelly uses the same motif from a century's distance to powerfully portray the poverty, racism, and feminism of the early twentieth century. Mattie, with honest and lucid words, powerfully portrays her world, so different from the reality her peers face today. She witnesses suffering and death from a close-up that is no longer often encountered.

"Northern Lights" immediately became a favorite reading upon its publication and is one of the rare contemporary books that makes the troubles and joys of a long-lost world seem as real as the present. The novel has also won numerous prestigious awards.