Both Sides of Bare Tree Mountain

In 1961, a young girl and her grandmother set out from their Appalachian home on an odyssey to the city to retrieve the girl's uncle from the State Hospital where he was committed a few days earlier. While on their journey, the girl witnesses a crime which leads to a confrontation with the criminal and her grandmother's encounter with a charlatan TV evangelist. Along the way they meet con men, a clown, a killer, and common folk inhabitants of coal mining country. The events that follow pull the characters into an unexpected and unforgettable swirl of developments that take the odyssey to a gratifying conclusion.

Painted over a Southern Gothic canvas using a palette tinted with faint shades reminiscent of Flannery O'Conner, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, and Harper Lee, Both Sides of Bare Tree Mountain will leave a lasting impression. You won't want it to end.

Dale Lucha was born in Logan, West Virginia, and grew up in the southern coalfields of the state during the hardscrabble years of the 1950s and 1960s. He and his wife Sandi still make their home in the hills. A third-generation coal miner, Lucha worked in the coal industry for forty-two years in a career that grew from a menial clerical job to managerial and executive positions with several major U.S. coal companies. He ultimately became owner of an international management consulting firm. When Covid-19 slowed business travel and put idle time at his disposal, he revived a forty-year-old manuscript and developed it into his first published novel, Both Sides of Bare Tree Mountain.