For fans of Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx, "a wonderfully cinematic
story" (The Washington Post) set in the post-Katrina South after violent
storms have decimated the region.It had been raining for weeks. Maybe
months. He had forgotten the last day that it hadn't rained, when the
storms gave way to the pale blue of the Gulf sky, when the birds flew
and the clouds were white and sunshine glistened across the drenched
land. The Gulf Coast has been brought to its knees. Years of
catastrophic hurricanes have so punished and depleted the region that
the government has drawn a new boundary ninety miles north of the
coastline. Life below the Line offers no services, no electricity, and
no resources, and those who stay behind live by their own
rules--including Cohen, whose wife and unborn child were killed during
an evacuation attempt. He buried them on family land and never left. But
after he is ambushed and his home is ransacked, Cohen is forced to flee.
On the road north, he is captured by Aggie, a fanatical, snake-handling
preacher who has a colony of captives and dangerous visions of
repopulating the barren region. Now Cohen is faced with a decision:
continue to the Line alone, or try to shepherd the madman's prisoners
across the unforgiving land with the biggest hurricane yet bearing
down--and Cohen harboring a secret that poses the greatest threat of
all. Eerily prophetic in its depiction of a Southern landscape ravaged
by extreme weather, Rivers is a masterful tale of survival and
redemption in a world where the next devastating storm is never far
behind."This is the kind of book that lifts you up with its mesmerizing
language then pulls you under like a riptide" (The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution).
