This, the week of the US election, is a good moment to look at the books we publish by American authors which are set in different parts of the country. Emmeline was written in 1980 but is about the hardscrabble life of the mill girls - some as young as 13 - in the 1840s in Lowell, Massachusetts. (They had earlier made history when they went on strike in 1834 and created the first union of working women in America.)