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Watershed

Set in 1937 in rural Tennessee, with the construction of a monumental dam serving as background — a cinematically biblical effort to harness elemental forces and bring power to the people — Watershed delivers a gripping story of characters whose ambitions and yearnings threaten to overflow the banks of their time and place.

Nathan, an engineer hiding from his past, and Claire, a small-town housewife, struggle to find their footing in the newly-electrified, job-hungry, post-Depression South. As Nathan wrestles with the burdens of a secret guilt and tangled love, Claire struggles to balance motherhood and a newfound freedom that awakens ambitions and a sexuality she hadn’t known she possessed.

The arrival of electricity in the rural community — where violence, prostitution, and dog-fighting are commonplace — thrusts together the federal and local worlds, in an evocative feat of storytelling in the vein of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, and Ron Rash’s Serena.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 304
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781938235597
  • Settings
  • Tennessee River Valley, Tennessee, Memphis, Tennessee
  • Genres
  • fiction, historical, southern
  • Release date
  • 2019