At the age of eighty, Brendan Auberon—formerly of the Order of Our Lady of the Valley, now confined to a nursing home—has one last wish: to see his 200 acres overlooking what used to be Paradise Valley, before the villages were drowned to provide water for the city of Boston. Now, Brendan’s memories drift beneath the surface of the Stillwater Reservoir. When Brendan dupes his nephew, Henry, into hijacking the nursing home van for the journey, what begins as a lark becomes an adventure infinitely more complex.
Andrea Barrett is the author of Archangel, The Air We Breathe, Servants of the Map (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), The Voyage of the Narwhal, Ship Fever (winner of the National Book Award), and other books. She teaches at Williams College and lives in northwestern Massachusetts.
"Of all the writers in the present generation, I can think of no one who's better at exploring the crystaline structures of human relations than Andrea Barrett. The lady has a very powerful microscope. The Forms of Water is just lovely -- deeply funny, deeply serious, and wise."
Francine Prose
"Something about Andrea Barrett's writing, her honesty, her patience with -- and wyre compassion for -- her characters makes one wish that more novels were as engaging or just as well as well-written as The Forms of Water."
