A Today Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Selection
One of Oprah Dailys Most Anticipated Books of the Year
One of the Chicago Review of Bookss 12 Must-Read Books of the Month
Featured in Roxane Gays newsletter, The Audacity
One of Christian Science Monitors Best Books of the Month

[The Waters] delivers us to a place of real magic. Ron Charles, Washington Post

A master of rural noir returns with a fierce, mesmerizing novel about exceptional women and the soul of a small town.

On an island in the Great Massasauga Swampan area known as The Waters to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michiganherbalist and eccentric Hermine Herself Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three estranged daughters. The youngestthe beautiful, inscrutable, and lazy Rose Thornhas left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy Donkey Zook, to grow up wild.

Donkey spends her days searching for truths in the lush landscape and in her math books, waiting for her wayward mother and longing for a father, unaware that family secrets, passionate love, and violent men will flood through the swamp and upend her idyllic childhood. Rage simmers below the surface of this divided community, and those on both sides of the divide have closed their doors against the enemy. The only bridge across the waters is Rose Thorn.

With a ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world (Jane Smiley, New York Times Book Review), Bonnie Jo Campbell presents an elegant antidote to the dark side of masculinity, celebrating the resilience of nature and the brutality and sweetness of rural life.