Stephanie Soileau in conversation with Elizabeth Wetmore, "Should the Waters Take Us"

Join us in-store to celebrate the release of Stephanie Soileau's newest book, Should the Waters Take Us, with conversation partner, Elizabeth Wetmore!

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About the Book:
In the shifting bayous of coastal Louisiana, on a rapidly disappearing spit of land, generations of Acadians have kept their heads above water any way they can. When an offshore rig explodes and unleashes a catastrophic spill, the people of Pelerin Parish face a reckoning that tests the bonds of family and the survival of their way of life.

As the toxic plume of oil advances across the Gulf, Boy Broussard, already living hand to mouth off another man’s land, finds himself raising a daughter he barely knows. His dying aunt, Rosa Terrebonne, tries to right the misdeeds of the past yet finds herself thwarted by her husband, Jacot, a retired landman for big oil who refuses to give up claim to the plot of ground where Boy makes his living. Meanwhile, the parish priest, Father Fabian, far from his home in the Niger Delta, lends his assistance to Boy’s all-but-motherless daughter, only to be met with suspicion and hostility from the insular community. When a powerful hurricane threatens to turn an already dire situation into a total cataclysm, this sharp-edged cast of characters collides in a thunderclap of resentment and violence. Throughout all this, Soileau unfolds a sweeping tapestry of loss, resilience, and the fragile miracle of hope.

Should the Waters Take Us reaches across four hundred years of history to illuminate the many epochs and peoples of this storied place. Soileau has crafted an emotionally explosive family saga, as well as a masterful literary crie de coeur about the ways in which moral compromise can eat away at the very fabric of the places we call home.

About the author:
STEPHANIE SOILEAU is the author of the critically acclaimed story collection Last One Out Shut Off the Lights. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford University and the National Endowment for the Arts. Originally from Lake Charles, Louisiana, Soileau now lives in Chicago with her family and teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Chicago.

About the conversation partner:
Elizabeth Wetmore’s debut novel Valentine (Harper, March 2020) was named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Barnes and Noble, BuzzFeed, and others. It won the Chicago Writers Association’s Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize. The French translation was shortlisted for the 2020 Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. Named one of the 30 most essential books about Texas by Texas Monthly and a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction, Valentine was also a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A native of West Texas, Elizabeth lives in Chicago, where she is writing a book about cattle ranching in South Texas.