'The Sweetness of Water' is having a moment that goes beyond topicality. Nathan Harris makes those extraordinary, still contested times comprehensible through an immersive, incredibly humane storytelling about the lives of ordinary people. In struggles over flags, monuments, textbooks, and university tenure, we're still fighting over how to frame this event in public memory, so those old wounds feel particularly fresh. Like a fictional companion to Clint's Smith's history How the Word is Passed, The Sweetness of Water joins the national conversation on race and reckoning with history already in progress. Second, the peacemaking project attempted on these pages is still clearly unfinished. Between the January insurrection, the threat of Texas secession, and the daily rhetoric of combat and revolution, the battles are ongoing, not just along party but also regional lines. There are several reasons for that: First, its question feels urgent and familiar, because politics now feels like war. But posing the question and following through the work undertaken felt incredibly worthwhile nonetheless.īetween Oprah's Book Club, President Obama's summer reading list and the Booker Prize long list, The Sweetness of Water is having a moment that goes beyond topicality. Lee's surrender at Appomattox and the enforcement of emancipation in the South through the presence of Union troops, Harris asks a question Americans have yet to figure out: How does a community make peace in the wake of civil war? I'm not sure the novel comes close to finding an answer. Focusing on the period just after Robert E. Old Ox, Georgia, is a community attempting to right itself after tectonic upheaval. Evocative and accessible, Nathan Harris's debut novel The S weetness of Water is a historical page-turner about social friction so powerful it ignites a whole town.

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