Sara Greystone's career as a public defender is spiraling after a disastrous court case, and now her husband's IT career is also in jeopardy. A move to California is supposed to get them both back on their feet, but the state is in the midst of a crippling economic downturn-and then Sara's mother falls seriously ill. In the face of migration, illness, unemployment, and the tantalising possibility of infidelity, Sara has to work out who she is and what she really wants.
Spanning 1997 to 2012, Dry River echoes Wallace Stegner's classic Angle of Repose, moving across place and time to chart the slow collapse of a marriage alongside a declining US economy.
Endorsements for Dry River:
Dry River is a touching, powerful and elegantly written novel about contemporary marriage and the complex forces, both private and public, that bind people together and pull them apart.
-Ian McGuire, author of The Abstainer and The North Water, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the 2017 RSL Encore Award and the HWA Gold Crown Award
Dry River is a stunning, intricate novel of one woman's transformation as she juggles family and career during the turmoil of the global financial crisis. With elegant prose, a deeply felt sense of place, and an emotional intelligence reminiscent of Anne Lamott and Elizabeth Strout, Rouverol affirms how chance connections between strangers, even fleeting ones, can give us the courage to remake ourselves.
-Barbara Barrow, author of The Quelling and An Unclean Place
Dry River is a candid, thoughtful look at contemporary American marriage and economic migrations, and the pressures on a generation raised to believe they could have it all. Rouverol's prose is clear and swift, propelling you with her vivid characters in their search for love, purpose, and belonging.
-Maria Hummel, author of Still Lives, a Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine Book Club pick
Alicia Rouverol proves that a strong female character can also be entertaining. Sara, the protagonist of Dry River, makes mistakes so that we don't feel so alone in making the same ones too. As a lawyer, Sara believes in fairness and she's convinced that she knows what relationships are right for others-until her own marriage begins to fall apart and she starts to doubt her own truths. I admire how, despite the temptations that come her way, she stays true to herself and never chooses the easy way out. Above all, I admire Rouverol's ability to delight us by holding a mirror to our lives mired in unattainable desires. She reminds us to keep striving.
-Olga Zilberbourg, author of Like Water & Other Stories