Bodies of Water

"... a collection of quiet power, one that finds meaning in life’s small reckonings and hard-won moments of understanding. A stunner." — BookView Review

"... a powerfully evocative set of short stories..." — Diane Donovan, Sr. Reviewer for Midwest Book Review

Water gathers in every story here, but it never means just one thing. It is a creek carrying the residue of a city, a river glimpsed at dawn, a harbor holding old departures, an estuary crowded with celebration, and a channel emptied by drought. Around each one, Marylee MacDonald places people facing the moment when the life they know can no longer remain unchanged.

Across fourteen linked-by-theme stories, readers meet characters whose turning points are quiet but consequential: a blind man learning to trust the world again, a widow bargaining with an Amish carpenter, a craftsman waiting decades for the return of what was stolen, and a woman following a stranger through midnight streets until she discovers a way to release the past.

For readers drawn to the emotional precision of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and the vivid, unsentimental humanity of Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, Bodies of Water offers a bittersweet passage through grief, belonging, and the choices that reshape our lives.

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You can also listen to the audiobook on Audible.