Ezra Burke, like his tenant-farmer father before him, struggles to eke out a livingfrom a rented plot of depleted, rocky soil in his beloved Blue Ridge Mountains.With crops destroyed by a freakish summer storm and hopelessly in debt, he isforced into the employ of the wicked and cunning landowner. When further tragedystrikes, Ezra, still a young, but now a desperate man, hears of work down inCorinth-the cotton mills are hiring.With his wife Judith-half Cherokee and who alone bears the burden of a dark andterrible secret-and two small children, Ezra leaves the mountains for a new lifein Corinth where he has found work at the mammoth Galway Mill. An honest andindependent man, he is ill-prepared for the intrigues, politics, and greed of mill lifein the industrial city.As the dream of someday returning to the mountains slowly, but inevitability fades, the hardships and injustices imposed on the workers by the wealthy mill ownersbecome untenable. When union organizers from the North arrive in Corinth, thesituation intensifies and finally reaches a boiling point. Threatened, manipulated, and ostracized, Ezra is faced with a choice-one that could cost him everything.Set against the backdrop of a recovering South still showing scars of Reconstruction, now stifled by the Great Depression, simmering but unspoken racial tensions, andunscrupulous mill owners, None but the Living explores the struggles and pathos ofdisplaced people trying to maintain their identity and values in a world new andstrange to them-a world of subterfuge, of haves and have-nots, of conformity, ofinjustice. Such is the saga of the Burke family.
