Things We Found When the Water Went Down

by Tegan Nia Swanson

Narrated by Ann Richardson

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Pub Date Dec 06 2022 | Archive Date Dec 13 2022

HighBridge Audio | Highbridge Audio

General Fiction (Adult) | Literary Fiction

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Description

In this dark and ethereal debut novel, a young woman tries to make sense of strange artifacts and unsettling memories in an effort to find her mother—missing since being accused of murder

When brutish miner Hugo Mitchum is found murdered on the frozen shore of a North Country lake, the local officials and town gossips of Beau Caelais are quick to blame Marietta Abernathy, outspoken environmental activist and angry, witchy recluse. But Marietta herself has disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Living on an isolated island with her father, Marietta's sixteen-year-old daughter, Lena, begins sifting through her mother's journals and collected oddities in an attempt to find her. While her father's grief threatens to consume him and her adoptive aunt Bea reckons with guilt and acceptance, it is the haunting town outcast Ellis Olsen who might have the most to lose if Lena fails to find her mother.

A Nordic eco-noir shot through with magical realism, Things We Found When the Water Went Down examines power, identity, and myth in a story that asks us to explore what it means to heal—or not—after violence.

A Note From the Publisher

A Library Journal Most Anticipated Fall Debut

Advance Praise

"Tegan Nia Swanson's debut is a multi-faceted excavation of inherited trauma in both the spiritual and physical world that asks if regrowth is possible after immolation and offers no easy answers. In shifting forms and propulsive language, she captures the impossibility of history, the fierce pride of so-called otherness, and the dream of a gentler world. Immersive, heartbreaking, and cathartic." —Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House

"Things We Found When the Water Went Down is an ethereal, mixed media mystery novel about what we lose when the strongest, most vulnerable among us are made to disappear." —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews (starred review)

"Atmospheric . . . Though Swanson’s novel includes news stories, police interviews, and other elements of a detective story, it resists easy categorization. Swanson shifts from footnoted just-the-facts police interviews to lyrical prose poems to visual collages; the cast of characters is similarly diverse . . . An inventive and beguiling debut." —Kirkus Reviews