The Waters
by Bonnie Jo Campbell
W. W. Norton, 2024
The former Mackey Chair’s new novel is a swampy fairy tale about exceptional women. With what Jane Smiley in The New York Times Book Review calls a “ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world,” Campbell presents an elegant antidote to the dark side of masculinity, celebrating the feminine, the resilience of nature, and the brutality and sweetness of rural life.