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All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall

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All the Water in the World

A Novel

by Eiren Caffall

Narrator Eunice Wong

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Length 8 hours 41 minutes

Language English

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Summary
About the author

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.

"Captivating...The setting, the detailed emotive descriptions, and nail-biting adventure are incandescent." —Library Journal (starred)

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.

Fiction Mystery & Thriller Science Fiction Apocalyptic & Dystopian

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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Audiobook details

Author:
Eiren Caffall

Narrator:
Eunice Wong

ISBN:
9781250381323

Length:
8 hours 41 minutes

Language:
English

Publisher:
Macmillan Audio

Publication date:
January 7, 2025

Edition:
Unabridged

Reviews

"A celebration of human perseverance at the hands of nature’s awe-inspiring power...Gripping, beautifully descriptive, and likely to stay with you." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Commanding, heart-pounding, and haunting...Caffall has thought through every detail, matching adrenaline—raising action with profound insights into nature, science, museums, justice, family, and compassion." —Booklist, starred review

"A gorgeously written novel that tackles not just the climate condition, but the human one. Narrated by Nonie, a young member of a family in the near future, All the Water in the World tells the story of their escape from their dwelling, which just happens to be the top of the Museum of Natural History (called Amen) until after a fierce super storm makes it inhabitable, forcing them to flee to what they desperately hope is going to be safety. This is one brilliant and engrossing book—and I’ll say my heartfelt 'Amen' to that."
—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and Days of Wonder

"Along with its gorgeous language, its deeply human characters, its stay up all night 'cause you have to know what happens storytelling, All the Water in the World does the goddamn impossible. It makes the climate crisis real. Devastatingly, terrifyingly, gloriously real. Eiren Caffall is a masterfulful storyteller."
—Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

"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

"When the world collapses, will our love for each other? Eiren Caffall answers the hard questions in this luminous novel. All the Water in the World is a masterful story of a family fighting to not be drowned by a changing world. Each sentence is a treasure. Read this and be changed."
—Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Child Finder and Sleeping Giants

"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

"With its beautiful sentences and a propulsive plot, All the Water in the World, asks us how we continue to love both a world in environmental crisis and each other through that crisis. This is an essential novel for our times. Nonie, the young, neuro-divergent, main character will whisper in my ears for a very long time and that is the most powerful work a book can do."
—Nayomi Munaweera- award-winning author of Island of a Thousand Mirrors and What Lies Between Us

"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