All The Glowing Girls

A Novel of the Radium Girls

She put the brush to her lips because they told her it was safe.

Orange, New Jersey, 1917. Grace is eighteen years old, ambitious, and desperate for independence. When she lands a job painting watch dials with luminous radium paint—twenty dollars a week, more than her father earns—she thinks her life has finally begun. The work is delicate, beautiful, modern. The factory glows. The girls glow. The company says the paint is perfectly safe. It isn’t.

Years later, Grace’s jaw is crumbling. Her bones fracture when she coughs. Her friend Mollie is dead—her death certificate stamped with a lie. And the company that poisoned them has hired investigators to destroy their reputations, doctors to deny the science, and lawyers to run out the clock. Grace is twenty-eight, she weighs eighty-eight pounds, and she cannot raise her hand to take an oath. But she can nod.

Told in Grace’s own voice as events unfold, All the Glowing Girls is the story of five women who were told a beautiful lie and lived long enough to fight for the truth. Inspired by the real Radium Girls whose landmark case transformed American labor law, this is a novel about what happens when ordinary people refuse to be silent—even when silence is the only thing a dying body wants.

For readers of The Women by Kristin Hannah, The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, and The Radium Girls by Kate Moore.