Karen Powell, whose previous novel is “The River Within,” is the author most recently of “Fifteen Wild Decembers.”

Q. Please tell readers about your novel, “Fifteen Wild Decembers.”

Like many readers, I first discovered Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” as a teenager. I was mesmerized by the wild moorland landscape she described and the equally wild characters that inhabited it.

When I finished reading, I turned to the introduction and was surprised to learn that the author of this passionate, violent novel had led a seemingly uneventful life. The daughter of an Anglican clergyman, Emily lived almost all of her life in Haworth, a remote village in the southern Pennines, hundreds of miles from literary London. She had no friends outside the family and was deeply reserved, silent to the point of rudeness when forced into company. Emily never married and there is no evidence of any romantic connections before her death at the tragically young age of 30.

I was intrigued right away by the disconnect. I wondered how someone of Emily’s background could write a novel which scandalized Victorian readers – a contemporaneous reviewer suggested the author should have committed suicide rather than continue! – and still has the power to shock to this day.

I started writing in my early thirties, around the same time that I moved to Yorkshire. Now within driving distance of Haworth, I was able to explore the wild landscape that Emily had described for myself. And, of course, to visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which was once home to family. The museum is so wonderfully curated that you almost expect to find Emily and her sisters working on their novels at the original dining table, in a room which overlooks the graveyard and the church where their father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, preached.

I began to understand that Emily’s life here was far more tumultuous than I’d first thought. She and her sisters lived under the constant threat of both penury and homelessness – when their elderly, half-blind father died the parsonage would revert to the church governors, while their attempts to earn a living through teaching or governess work had ended miserably. Added to this, their brother Branwell, the only son and once the great hope of the family, had become addicted to both alcohol and laudanum after a disastrous love affair with a married woman. Visitors to the parsonage are often struck by how tiny it is. There would have been nowhere to hide from Branwell’s despair and the ensuing chaos of addiction. Emily’s home in Haworth was hardly an idyllic writing retreat and yet…

I don’t recall the precise moment I decided I must write her story, but the idea must have lurked somewhere in my teenage brain and then started to evolve during those visits to Haworth.

Q. The Brontës grew up in Yorkshire and you live in North Yorkshire. Was knowing the landscape of the area essential to understanding the family?

It would be a tall order to write about Emily Brontë without having some familiarity with the moorland that surrounds her home in Haworth. Emily was so viscerally attached to this landscape that she suffered breakdowns almost every time she was forced to leave.

After Emily’s death, Charlotte wrote: “My sister loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was—liberty. Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it, she perished.”

In order to imagine my way into Emily’s mind, it was essential to walk in her footsteps, to learn this landscape – so different to the softer, more ordered countryside of the south-east of England where I grew up – for myself. I’ve spent many hours now on the moorland that rears up directly behind Emily’s parsonage home. It’s a very particular terrain: peaty, boggy, windswept, with a bleak beauty of its own: “No life higher than the grasstops, or the hearts of sheep,” as Sylvia Plath once described it. Aside from the reservoirs down in the valley, and the signposts in both English and Japanese to Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse and the alleged inspiration for Wuthering Heights, little can have changed since Emily walked here.

Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?

I listened to Taylor Swift almost exclusively while editing “Fifteen Wild Decembers,” to the extent that major scenes in the book are now inextricably linked in my mind with certain songs, with entire albums.

I could write about this at great length if anyone was ever interested, have a habit of telling people even if they aren’t. And don’t get me started on The Eras Tour.

Q. You’re writing historical fiction, not history. Can you talk about the difference?

You won’t find me deep in the archives trying to unearth new primary sources. To my mind, that’s a job best left to the historians. As a novelist, my work is to absorb and assess the information available – in the case of a family as famous as the Brontës, a great deal of research has already been carried out by people with far more expertise than me – and then to let my imagination work its way into any intriguing gaps in the narrative.

For example, in the prologue of “Fifteen Wild Decembers,” we meet 24-year-old Emily on a boat to Brussels. This trip was instigated by Charlotte, ostensibly so that the two sisters could improve their teaching qualifications at a Belgian school. Charlotte’s fictionalized account of Brussels in her novel “Villette” and her extant letters give us a good idea of what this adventure meant to her. As far as I’m aware though, there is no record of Emily’s state of mind on that boat trip. Given that she loathed to be away from her Yorkshire home, and was possibly already suspicious of Charlotte’s motivations, I hazarded a guess that her mood was less than sunny.

Similarly, we know exactly what the young Charlotte Brontë thought about Cowan Bridge School for Daughters of the Clergy because she reproduced it to devastating effect in “Jane Eyre,” and spoke bitterly about it for the rest of her life, but there is scant record of Emily’s presence at the school, let alone her feelings. Blanks in the historical record such as these are irresistible to a novelist!

Q. Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers?

In my early teens, my mother bought me a copy of “The Greengage Summer” by Rumer Godden. I lost it somewhere along the way, but made sure to buy another copy for my own daughter and now always recommend it to other readers.

It’s the story of 13-year-old Cecil who travels with her widowed mother and family to Hotel Les Oeillets, an idyllic yet faded hotel in the Champagne region of France. Her mother has taken her children there to show them the World War I battlefields, in the hope of curing them of selfishness, but when she falls ill they are thrust into the care of Eliot, a charming Englishman, and the confusing, contradictory, adult world of Les Oeillets.

The book was published in 1958 but stands the test of time. To my mind, it’s the perfect coming of age novel, gorgeously written and capturing perfectly that strange, disorienting experience of being on the brink of adulthood.

Q. What are you reading now?

I find fiction too distracting when I’m deep in edits, so I’m reading a history of Elizabethan England for a possible future project. I’m also still thinking about Graham Watson’s seminal biography “The Invention of Charlotte Brontë,” due to be published in the US this August.

Earlier in the year, I loved “Glorious Exploits” by Ferdia Lennon, a hugely entertaining story of a group of Athenian prisoners in Ancient Sicily who might just save themselves by agreeing to perform a Euripides’ play. And I’ve recently finished RAW CONTENT by Naomi Booth, a beautifully nuanced novel about a young woman overwhelmed by the responsibility of keeping her newborn daughter safe. An added bonus is that the novel is set in York where I live!

Q. How do you decide what to read next?

Social media, press reviews, book bloggers, whatever grabs my eye in the book shop. Recommendations from writing friends are really important too, especially since they’re likely to get their hands of proofs. I find the writing community incredibly generous and supportive, particularly of those who are just starting out and might need a boost from more established authors. I can still remember getting a direct message and an endorsement from Elizabeth McNeal (“The Doll Factory,” Circus of Wonders,” “The Burial Plot”) after she’d finished my previous novel “The River Within.” It meant everything.

Q. Do you have a favorite character or quote from a book?

Nostalgia comes into play here, so when it comes to choosing a favourite character I veer naturally towards the books I loved as a child or came to in my early teenager years. There might be a bit of a scrap involving Elizabeth Bennet, Nancy Blackett (“Swallows and Amazons”) and Laura Ingalls Wilder (I know, not a character as such) but Anne Shirley would probably win the day.

My novel-in-progress is inspired by a quotation, the first line of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy”:

‘In the middle of the journey of our life I came upon myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.’

Q. Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?

Not so much my reading life, but a tiny yet fearsome English teacher planted the idea in my mind that I could write.

She won’t remember me. I was a bright but unenthusiastic teenager, with no interest in making anyone’s teaching day more enjoyable. I imagined myself to be coolly cynical, too worldly for the classroom. Almost certainly I came across as a massive misery guts. And though I was considered good at English – I read extensively and therefore had a vocabulary and reasonable grasp of grammar – I didn’t much like writing stories. That meant coming up with a plot, which is something I struggle with to this day.

When instructed to write a story about first love, I chose to ignore the hopeless creatures who’d shambled in and out of my teenage world and wrote about Greece instead, a landscape and culture that have enthralled me ever since I first visited at the age of 13.

This plotless ‘story’ was returned to my desk with just one word: ‘beautiful.’ We never spoke of it again and I remained as charmless and unteachable as ever. The idea that I could write something beautiful and worthy of praise must have lodged though, and my love of the Mediterranean landscape remains to this day. My novel-in-progress is set at a beach resort between Naples and Rome.

Q. What do you find the most appealing in a book: the plot, the language, the cover, a recommendation? Do you have any examples?

I’ll happily whizz through any number of books which are plot-driven as long as the rest of the writing isn’t embarrassing. I don’t have a great capacity for retention though, so it takes emotional resonance and a facility for language to engage my mind after I’ve turned the last page.

Q. Do you have a favorite bookstore or bookstore experience?

Independent bookshops are a gift to authors. Should any of your readers ever find their way to my part of England, I can recommend The Grove Bookshop in Ilkley, Criminally Good Books in York, and Collected Books in Durham which I discovered via my American writing pal, Patricia Grace King. And if you’re ever lucky enough to go to Haworth, don’t miss the trove of Brontë-related literature, including “Fifteen Wild Decembers,” in the Brontë Parsonage Museum gift shop.

While we’re in Brontë territory, I urge you to walk down the vertiginously steep Main Street – perhaps making a detour to the Old Post Office restaurant which still retains the original counter from where the Brontë sisters posted out their manuscripts – until you find your way to a small but very special bookshop.

Wave of Nostalgia started out as a vintage clothing store but branched out into books during lockdown. These days Diane Park and her team do an incredible job of hand selling books and promoting authors through an extensive events programme. My first-ever “Fifteen Wild Decembers” event was held here and I was lucky enough to return recently for a Brontë themed event in the magical setting of St Michael and All Angels church, where the Reverend Patrick Brontë preached and where all of the family with the exception of Anne, are now buried.

I’m so grateful to Diane and to all the other independent booksellers for consistently supporting my work.

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A tempest of trumpets took over the Como Lakeside Pavilion on Monday, sharing a repertory ranging from tunes written to be performed in a cathedral during the Renaissance to Wagner as well as Disney favorites. The Twin Cities Trumpet Ensemble is celebrating its 10-year anniversary, having started with just a handful of musicians—including conductor and trumpet player James Olcott, a retired professor who spent 35 years teaching at Miami University in Ohio. The group has since grown to around two dozen players and has featured more than 60 trumpeters over the years.

The evening opened with a striking work written for the group by Paul Murtha, “Signature Fanfare.” The swelling sound, produced by trumpets of all sizes plus timpani, chimes, and other percussion, made for a rather magnificent start.

The group then performed a Sacrae Symphoniae, titled “Canzon per sonar septimi & octavi toni a 12,” by Italian composer and organist Giovanni Gabrieli. The music was originally written to be performed at the San Marco Cathedral, with sound coming from both choir lofts and from a third grouping of musicians in front of the altar. While Como Lakeside Pavilion may have markedly different acoustics from a cathedral, its architecture does create some echo. In addition, the sound of wind, the occasional airplane and a bird or two flying nearby made for a lively aural landscape accompanying the trumpet music. Olcott’s light and airy transposition of the work captured Gabrieli’s multi-voice structure.

There’s something beautiful about so many musicians who love the trumpet instrument gathering together to play as one ensemble. There may have been a stray note here or there, but the breezy setting and joyful sound made by so many trumpets made any wobbles float by with the breeze.

After the Gabrieli, the group performed Gabriel Fauré’s “Pavane,” also arranged by Olcott. A slinky trumpet solo wove through the piece, gradually joined by glowing harmonies that lifted the ensemble’s sound.

The group gave an impressive performance of its adaptation of a March taken from Richard Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” also transposed by Olcott. With its military beat and rhythm that began slow and moved into a quicker pace, it was a grand and festive number.

The group featured several works from films, beginning with John Williams’ iconic “Star Wars” theme. Williams’ fanfare highlights a variety of brass instruments with trumpets featured prominently, so to have it performed by only trumpets plus percussion made it seem like it was always written that way.

They also performed a medley of Disney films, with music arranged by Michael Serber, and performed two works by 20th-century composer Leroy Anderson, known for his light orchestral works written for the Boston Pops orchestra. Anderson’s “A Trumpeter’s Lullaby” boasted wonderfully mellow solo work, while later in the show the composer’s “Bugler’s Holiday” offered a fast and furious explosion of energy.

One of the evening’s most ambitious selections was “The Great Gate of Kiev” from “Pictures at an Exhibition,” originally a piano suite by Modest Mussorgsky. The ensemble performed Bradley Ulrich’s arrangement, based on Maurice Ravel’s famous orchestration. They handled the piece’s grand cascading melodies handily, even as a gust of wind blew some of their sheet music off their stands.

As an encore, Olcott picked up his own trumpet to play “Hava Nagila,” the well-known Jewish folk tune, with the musicians joining with their instruments and by stamping their feet.

TCTE’s performance at the pavilion was a somewhat shortened version of concerts they performed throughout the year. At the show, they entreated the audience to follow them on social media to learn about upcoming concerts, including their annual performances for the holiday season.

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By CATHY BUSSEWITZ, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Department of Labor is aiming to rewrite or repeal more than 60 “obsolete” workplace regulations, ranging from minimum wage requirements for home health care workers and people with disabilities to standards governing exposure to harmful substances.

If approved, the wide-ranging changes unveiled this month also would affect working conditions at constructions sites and in mines, and limit the government’s ability to penalize employers if workers are injured or killed while engaging in inherently risky activities such as movie stunts or animal training.

The Labor Department says the goal is to reduce costly, burdensome rules imposed under previous administrations, and to deliver on President Donald Trump’s commitment to restore American prosperity through deregulation.

“The Department of Labor is proud to lead the way by eliminating unnecessary regulations that stifle growth and limit opportunity,” Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in a statement, which boasted the “most ambitious proposal to slash red tape of any department across the federal government.”

FILE – Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer listens as President Donald Trump speaks with reporters while signing executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House, April 23, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

Critics say the proposals would put workers at greater risk of harm, with women and members of minority groups bearing a disproportionate impact.

“People are at very great risk of dying on the job already,” Rebecca Reindel, the AFL-CIO union’s occupational safety and health director, said. “This is something that is only going to make the problem worse.”

The proposed changes have several stages to get through before they can take effect, including a public comment period for each one.

Here’s a look at some of the rollbacks under consideration:

No minimum wage for home health care workers

Home health care workers help elderly or medically fragile people by preparing meals, administering medications, assisting with toilet use, accompanying clients to doctor appointments and performing other tasks. Under one of the Labor Department’s proposals, an estimated 3.7 million workers employed by home care agencies could be paid below the federal minimum wage — currently $7.25 per hour — and made ineligible for overtime pay if they aren’t covered by corresponding state laws.

The proposed rule would reverse changes made in 2013 under former President Barack Obama and revert to a regulatory framework from 1975. The Labor Department says that by lowering labor and compliance costs, its revisions might expand the home care market and help keep frail individuals in their homes for longer.

FILE – Caregiver Warren Manchess helping Paul Gregoline with his shoes and socks, in Noblesville, Ind., Nov. 27, 2013. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings, File)

Judy Conti, director of government affairs at the National Employment Law Project, said her organization plans to work hard to defeat the proposal. Home health workers are subject to injuries from lifting clients, and “before those (2013) regulations, it was very common for home care workers to work 50, 60 and maybe even more hours a week, without getting any overtime pay,” Conti said.

Others endorse the proposal, including the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative nonprofit based in Virginia. Women often bear the brunt of family caregiving responsibilities, so making home care more affordable would help women balance work and personal responsibilities, the group’s president, Carrie Lukas, said.

“We’re pleased to see the Trump administration moving forward on rolling back some of what we saw as counterproductive micromanaging of relationships that were making it hard for people to get the care they need,” Lukas said.

Samantha Sanders, director of government affairs and advocacy at the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, said the repeal would not constitute a win for women.

“Saying we actually don’t think they need those protections would be pretty devastating to a workforce that performs really essential work and is very heavily dominated by women, and women of color in particular,” Sanders said.

Protections for migrant farm workers

Last year, the Labor Department finalized rules that provided protections to migrant farmworkers who held H-2A visas. The current administration says most of those rules placed unnecessary and costly requirements on employers.

Under the new proposal, the Labor Department would rescind a requirement for most employer-provided transportation to have seat belts for those agriculture workers.

The department is also proposing to reverse a 2024 rule that protected migrant farmworkers from retaliation for activities such as filing a complaint, testifying or participating in an investigation, hearing or proceeding.

“There’s a long history of retaliation against workers who speak up against abuses in farm work. And with H-2A it’s even worse because the employer can just not renew your visa,” said Lori Johnson, senior attorney at Farmworker Justice.

Michael Marsh, president and CEO of the National Council of Agricultural Employers, applauded the deregulation efforts, saying farmers were hit with thousands of pages of regulations pertaining to migrant farmworkers in recent years.

“Can you imagine a farmer and his or her spouse trying to navigate 3,000 new pages of regulation in 18 months and then be liable for every one of them?” he asked.

Adequate lighting for construction spaces

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the Labor Department, wants to rescind a requirement for employers to provide adequate lighting at construction sites, saying the regulation doesn’t substantially reduce a significant risk.

FILE – Construction workers frame up a roof of wood lumber at a new home build, April 1, 2025, in Laveen, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)

OSHA said if employers fail to correct lighting deficiencies at construction worksites, the agency can issue citations under its “general duty clause.” The clause requires employers to provide a place of employment free from recognized hazards which are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.

Worker advocates think getting rid of a specific construction site requirement is a bad idea. “There have been many fatalities where workers fall through a hole in the floor, where there’s not adequate lighting,” Reindel said. “It’s a very obvious thing that employers should address, but unfortunately it’s one of those things where we need a standard, and it’s violated all the time.”

Mine safety

Several proposals could impact safety procedures for mines. For example, employers have to submit plans for ventilation and preventing roof collapses in coal mines for review by the Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration. Currently, MSHA district managers can require mine operators to take additional steps to improve those plans.

FILE – A miner gathers his thought before taking part in a rescue mission, Jan. 3, 2006, in Tallmansville, W.Va.. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari, Pool, File)

The Labor Department wants to end that authority, saying the current regulations give the district manager the ability to draft and create laws without soliciting comments or action by Congress.

Similarly, the department is proposing to strip district managers of their ability to require changes to mine health and safety training programs.

Limiting OSHA’s reach

The general duty clause allows OSHA to punish employers for unsafe working conditions when there’s no specific standard in place to cover a situation.

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An OSHA proposal would exclude the agency from applying the clause to prohibit, restrict or penalize employers for “inherently risky professional activities that are intrinsic to professional, athletic, or entertainment occupations.”

A preliminary analysis identified athletes, actors, dancers, musicians, other entertainers and journalists as among the types of workers the limitation would apply to.

“It is simply not plausible to assert that Congress, when passing the Occupational Safety and Health Act, silently intended to authorize the Department of Labor to eliminate familiar sports and entertainment practices, such as punt returns in the NFL, speeding in NASCAR, or the whale show at SeaWorld,” the proposed rule reads.

Debbie Berkowitz, who served as OSHA chief of staff during the Obama administration, said she thinks limiting the agency’s enforcement authority would be a mistake.

“Once you start taking that threat away, you could return to where they’ll throw safety to the wind, because there are other production pressures they have,” Berkowitz said.

By STAN CHOE, Associated Press Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street is hanging around its records on Tuesday following some mixed profit reports, as General Motors and other big U.S. companies give updates on how much President Donald Trump’s tariffs are hurting or helping them.

The S&P 500 was virtually unchanged in early trading, a day after inching to its latest all-time high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 27 points, or 0.1%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was slipping 0.1% after setting its own record.

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General Motors dropped 5.2% despite reporting a stronger profit for the spring than analysts expected. The automaker said it’s still expecting a $4 billion to $5 billion hit to its results over 2025 because of tariffs and that it hopes to mitigate 30% of that. GM also said it will feel more pain because of tariffs in the current quarter than it did during the spring.

That helped to offset big gains for some homebuilders after they reported stronger profits for the spring than Wall Street had forecast. D.R. Horton rallied 10.2%, and PulteGroup rose 7.7%. That was even as both companies said customers are continuing to deal with challenging conditions, including higher mortgage rates and an uncertain economy.

So far, the U.S. economy seems to be powering through all the uncertainty created by Trump’s on-and-off tariffs. Many of Trump’s stiff proposed taxes on imports are currently on pause, and the next big deadline is Aug. 1. Talks are underway with other countries on possible trade deals that could lower the proposed tariffs before they kick in.

But companies are already feeling effects. Genuine Parts, the Atlanta-based company that sells auto and industrial replacement parts around the world, trimmed its profit forecast for the full year in order to incorporate “all U.S. tariffs currently in effect,” along with its updated expectations for business conditions in the second half of the year.

Its stock rose 2.5% after it reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

Coca-Cola fell 1.6% even though it likewise delivered a stronger profit than forecast. Its revenue for the quarter only edged past analysts’ expectations, and it said that higher prices that it charged helped offset sales of fewer cases during the spring.

In the bond market, Treasury yields held relatively steady as traders continue to expect the Federal Reserve to wait until September at the earliest to resume cutting interest rates.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell has been insisting he wants to see more data about how Trump’s tariffs are affecting inflation and the economy before the Fed makes its next move. That’s despite often angry criticism from Trump, who has been lobbying for more cuts to rates to happen sooner.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury eased to 4.36% from 4.38% late Monday.

In stock markets abroad, Japan’s Nikkei 225 initially jumped after reopening from a holiday on Monday but then fell back to a modest loss of 0.1%.

In Asian trading, Japan’s benchmark surged and then fell back as it reopened from a holiday Monday following the ruling coalition’s loss of its upper house majority in Sunday’s election. The Nikkei 225 shed 0.1%.

Analysts said the market initially climbed on relief that Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba vowed to stay in office despite a loss for his ruling coalition in an upper-house election Sunday. But the results have only added to political uncertainty and left his government without the heft needed to push through legislation.

A breakthrough in trade talks with the U.S. might win Ishiba a reprieve, but so far there’s been scant sign of progress in negotiating away the threat of higher tariffs on Japan’s exports to the U.S. beginning Aug. 1.

Indexes were mixed elsewhere in Asia and dipped across much of Europe.

AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.