The Tilted World

Southern Cross the Dog: A Novel

Bill Cheng · 324 pages

Convinced that he is cursed after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, 20-year-old Robert Chatham, who, constantly followed by trouble, has lost his will to live, finally shakes his demons until he is forced to make an impossible choice.

The Flood

Michael McDowell · 189 pages

At the crest of the worst flood in Perdido, Alabama's history, mysterious newcomer Elinor Dammert is rescued from the uppermost floor of an abandoned hotel. The town soon grows to love Elinor in spite of her unspoken past and her eccentric habits, and Oscar Caskey, head of the town's most powerful and influential family, soon takes her for his bride. But Oscar's mother, greedy and controlling Mary

Between Two Skies

Joanne O'Sullivan · 272 pages

Bayou Perdu, a tiny fishing town way, way down in Louisiana, is home to sixteen-year-old Evangeline Riley. She has her best friends, Kendra and Danielle; her wise, beloved Mamere; and back-to-back titles in the under-sixteen fishing rodeo. But, dearest to her heart, she has the peace that only comes when she takes her skiff out to where there is nothing but sky and air and water and wings. It s a

Edge of Dark Water

Joe R. Lansdale · 292 pages

May Lynn was once a pretty girl who dreamed of becoming a Hollywood star. Now she's dead, her body dredged up from the Sabine River. Sue Ellen, May Lynn's strong-willed teenage friend, sets out to dig up May Lynn's body, burn it to ash, and take those ashes to Hollywood to spread around. If May Lynn can't become a star, then at least her ashes will end up in the land of her dreams. Along with her

Long Man

Amy Greene · 271 pages

"In the summer of 1936, the TVA plans to build a dam in a Tennessee town at the same time a little girl goes missing--possibly stolen by a drifter determined to blow up the dam"--

The Rift

Walter Jon Williams · 726 pages

City of Refuge

Tom Piazza · 361 pages

In the heat of late summer, two New Orleans families—one black and one white—confront a storm that will change the course of their lives.SJ Williams, a carpenter and widower, lives and works in the Lower Ninth Ward, the community where he was born and raised. His sister, Lucy, is a soulful mess, and SJ has been trying to keep her son, Wesley, out of trouble. Across town, Craig Donaldson, a Midwest

The Wild Palms

William Faulkner · 315 pages

Two interlocking stories, one of an illicit love affair and the other of a convict sent out to do rescue work during a flood.

This Tender Land

William Kent Krueger · 464 pages

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America

John M. Barry · 528 pages

In 1927, the Mississippi River swept across an area roughly equal in size to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont combined, leaving water as deep as thirty feet on the land stretching from Illinois and Missouri south to the Gulf of Mexico. Close to a million people - in a nation of 120 million - were forced out of their homes. Some estimates place the death toll in the thousands.

Bindle Punk Jefe

Desideria Mesa · 345 pages

Summertime

Vanessa Lafaye · 354 pages

Florida, 1935, and the residents of Heron Key are preparing for the 4th of July barbecue, little realising how much their world is about to change. Tensions simmer at the party and in the early hours of the morning, a woman is found half-beaten to death. As whites turn on blacks, the finger of suspicion points at one man. Far over the Atlantic a tropical storm changes direction and turns towards F

Fevre Dream

George R.R. Martin · 352 pages

When struggling riverboat captain Abner Marsh receives an offer of partnership from a wealthy aristocrat, he suspects something's amiss. But when he meets the hauntingly pale, steely-eyed Joshua York, he is certain. For York doesn't care that the icy winter of 1857 has wiped out all but one of Marsh's dilapidated fleet. Nor does he care that he won't earn back his investment in a decade. York has

Saints at the River

Ron Rash · 239 pages

"When a twelve-year-old girl drowns in the Tamassee River and her body is trapped in a deep eddy, the small South Carolina town that bears the river's name becomes the center of a far-reaching controversy. Anxious to recover the body and give their daughter a proper burial, the girl's parents want to send divers down into the rain-swollen currents. But a contingent of environmentalists is opposed

The Promise

Ann Weisgarber · 317 pages

1900. Young pianist Catherine Wainwright flees the fashionable town of Dayton, Ohio in the wake of a terrible scandal. Heartbroken and facing destitution, she finds herself striking up correspondence with a childhood admirer, the recently widowed Oscar Williams. In desperation she agrees to marry him. But when Catherine travels to Oscar's farm on Galveston Island, Texas - a thousand miles from hom

The Tin Roof Blowdown

James Lee Burke · 373 pages

A Year of Marvellous Ways

Sarah Winman · 326 pages

Cornwall, 1947. Marvellous Ways is a ninety-year-old woman who's lived alone in a remote creek for nearly all her life. Recently she's taken to spending her days sitting on a mooring stone by the river with a telescope. She's waiting for something - she's not sure what, but she'll know it when she sees it. Drake is a young soldier left reeling by the war. He's agreed to fulfil a dying man's last w

Suttree

Cormac McCarthy · 471 pages

By the author of *Blood Meridian* and *All the Pretty Horses, Suttree* is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there--a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters--he rises above the physic

Gap Creek

Robert Morgan · 326 pages

"There is a most unusual woman living in Gap Creek. Julie Harmon works hard, "hard as a man" they say, so hard that at times she's not sure she can stop."--BOOK JACKET. "People depend on her. They need her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. She is just a teenager when her little brother dies in her arms. That same year she marries Hank and moves down into the valley where fire and visions

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

Sara Gran · 273 pages

This knock-out start to a bracingly original new series features Claire DeWitt, the world’s greatest PI—at least, that's what she calls herself. A one-time teen detective in Brooklyn, she is a follower of the esoteric French detective Jacques Silette, whose mysterious handbook Détection inspired Claire’s unusual practices. Claire also has deep roots in New Orleans, where she was mentored by Silett

There Are Rivers in the Sky

Elif Shafak · 446 pages

Finn

Jon Clinch · 312 pages

Dark and turgid as the Old Man in full spate, and as turgid with the dark shapes of things that won't stay dead. Haunted and delicately scribed like dawnmists on the levees. Read this and you will understand why Huck only slept well under under the open sky, why he could never breathe freely in any house, not really.

Hurricane Katrina, 2005

Lauren Tarshis

The Missing

Tim Gautreaux · 375 pages

The author of The Clearing ("the finest American novel in a long, long time"--Annie Proulx) now surpasses himself with a story whose range and cast of characters is even broader, with the fate of a stolen child looming throughout.Sam Simoneaux's troopship docked in France just as World War I came to an end. Still, what he saw of the devastation there sent him back to New Orleans eager for a normal