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A Novel
by Eiren Caffall
In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York's Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.
All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city's flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved.
Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story―with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most – love and work, community and knowledge – will survive.
"Captivating...The setting, the detailed emotive descriptions, and nail-biting adventure are incandescent." ―Library Journal (starred review)
"Stories of plague, gruesome death, and Nonie's mother's slow decline from kidney disease paint a bleak picture of subsistence amid the group's determined efforts to save knowledge. The plot will feel familiar to cli-fi readers, but it's affecting nonetheless. Caffall should win some fans with this." —Publishers Weekly
"I am gripped by Eiren Caffall's river-going adventure tale. It moves through darkness like the beam of a flashlight: urgent, questing, incandescent." ―Josephine Ferorelli, co-author of The Conceivable Future
"Eiren Caffall's exquisite novel of climate disaster and human tenderness has you trembling, turning pages faster and faster, wanting more, even as you try to slow down and savor writing so precisely lovely it alone breaks your heart." ―Bee Ridgway, author of The River of No Return
"All the Water in the World has everything: stunning prose, wonderful characters, powerful themes, and a plot that moves like a freight train... Nonie, the novel's narrator and heart, spins a tale that will make you think, bring you to tears, keep you on the edge of your seat, and leave you buzzing. Read this book immediately." ―Abby Geni, author of The Lightkeepers and The Body Farm
This information about All the Water in the World was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician whose work has appeared in Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, and on three record albums. She is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant and a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship at Northwestern University, among other awards. The author of a memoir, The Mourner's Bestiary (2024), she lives in Chicago with her family. All the Water in the World is her first novel.
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