Should the Waters Take Us by Stephanie Soileau.jpg
Should the Waters Take Us by Stephanie Soileau.jpg

Should the Waters Take Us by Stephanie Soileau

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Hardcover:

LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • An epic debut novel that follows one family across four centuries, from France to Acadia to the bayous of Southern Louisiana—a poignant examination of belonging, place, and how individual acts of moral compromise contribute to cycles of injustice and destruction.

“A deeply talented and wonderful writer.”—Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award-winning author of Salvage the Bones and Let Us Descend

“Should the Waters Take Us is filled with unforgettable characters, breathtaking scenes, fascinating time jumps, and a setting so precisely rendered that it’s palpable.” —Patrick Ryan, author of Buckeye

When an offshore rig explosion sends oil sheeting across the marsh, the Acadian community of Pelerin Parish is forced to reckon with what it has always known and refused to say out loud. Boy Broussard, raising the estranged daughter he barely knows, watches the coastline erode a little more each season. His dying aunt Rosa Terrebonne has spent decades at odds with her husband Jacot over his ties to the oil industry that both sustains and slowly drowns their home. Father Fabian offers what comfort he can to a parish that regards him with as much suspicion as need.

Spanning four centuries, from France to Acadia to the Louisiana bayous, Should the Waters Take Us moves between these interlaced lives as a hurricane bears down and old compromises come due. Stephanie Soileau writes with the patience of someone who has watched a place change and refused to look away, building a novel as much about what a community owes its dead as what it owes the living.

This is a story about the cost of staying, in a marriage, a faith, a flooding parish, when leaving might be the only sane choice, and about the people who stay anyway.

LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • An epic debut novel that follows one family across four centuries, from France to Acadia to the bayous of Southern Louisiana—a poignant examination of belonging, place, and how individual acts of moral compromise contribute to cycles of injustice and destruction.

“A deeply talented and wonderful writer.”—Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award-winning author of Salvage the Bones and Let Us Descend

“Should the Waters Take Us is filled with unforgettable characters, breathtaking scenes, fascinating time jumps, and a setting so precisely rendered that it’s palpable.” —Patrick Ryan, author of Buckeye

When an offshore rig explosion sends oil sheeting across the marsh, the Acadian community of Pelerin Parish is forced to reckon with what it has always known and refused to say out loud. Boy Broussard, raising the estranged daughter he barely knows, watches the coastline erode a little more each season. His dying aunt Rosa Terrebonne has spent decades at odds with her husband Jacot over his ties to the oil industry that both sustains and slowly drowns their home. Father Fabian offers what comfort he can to a parish that regards him with as much suspicion as need.

Spanning four centuries, from France to Acadia to the Louisiana bayous, Should the Waters Take Us moves between these interlaced lives as a hurricane bears down and old compromises come due. Stephanie Soileau writes with the patience of someone who has watched a place change and refused to look away, building a novel as much about what a community owes its dead as what it owes the living.

This is a story about the cost of staying, in a marriage, a faith, a flooding parish, when leaving might be the only sane choice, and about the people who stay anyway.

  • Publisher: Doubleday

    Title: Should the Waters Take Us: A Novel

    Author: Stephanie Soileau

    On Sale Date: July 14, 2026

    ISBN 13: 978-0-385-55178-6

    ISBN 10: 0385551789

    Format: Hardcover

    Retail Price: $30.00

    BISAC: Literary Fiction

    Page Count: 336

    Dimensions: 6-1/8 in W x 9-1/4 in H

  • Stephanie Soileau is the author of the story collection Last One Out Shut Off the Lights. A recipient of a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she was raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and now lives in Chicago, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.

  • Readers are calling it haunting, richly peopled, and unforgettable:

    • A love letter to a place and the people who make it a community.

    • An unflinching look at how environmental catastrophe reshapes a family from the inside out.

    • Praised for interweaving centuries of history into one deeply human present-day story.

    • A striking debut that critics are comparing to the work of Jesmyn Ward and Elizabeth Wetmore.

This book is for you if

  • You loved the multigenerational sweep of Valentine or the moral weight of Jesmyn Ward’s Mississippi novels.

  • You want literary fiction that treats climate and environmental loss as a slow, personal grief rather than a headline.

  • You’re drawn to stories rooted deeply in a specific American place and its history.

  • You appreciate novels that move across timelines without losing their emotional thread.

  • You want a debut novelist with genuine craft, not just promise.

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