Glass Season
A Historical Novel

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Every October the furnaces of Kettering Run are lit, and for eight months the whole town lives by the glow. In the autumn of nineteen eleven, seventeen-year-old Josie Varga packs bottles in the cold packing room and reads their flaws the way other girls read faces. Then a stranger in a pale coat sets one bottle on the superintendent's desk, and Josie cannot find a single fault in it. It was made by a machine that needs no blowers at all.

Her father, Istvan, is the finest master glassblower in the valley, and he is quietly losing his breath. Josie has promised to tell no one. She has also promised herself something else: to learn the craft the shop will not teach a girl. Her teacher is an old furnace-keeper going blind, who holds the one secret the company could never steal: how to make a deep ruby glass that only shows its color on the second fire.

Through a hard winter, a furnace accident that changes everything, a wage cut and a strike the town vows to keep fair, Josie, her father, a gatherer named Tobias who is both her friend and her rival, and a whole row of company houses must decide what a craft is worth when a machine can do it faster.

Warm, vivid and full of the sights and sounds of a working glass house, this is a story about breath, patience, and the things that cannot be counted. A hopeful, bittersweet historical novel for listeners who love family sagas, immigrant stories and the quiet drama of work done well.