Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction 2006

"Exquisite in every way."
—The Orlando Sun-Sentinel

October 1927. Noel, a hardened seaman, is approached by a local bootlegger to refit a boat for smuggling. He takes the job for the money it offers and the chance to build a future for his beloved granddaughter Bridge and her brother, Luce. Noel invests his windfall profit in the soaring stock market, but doesn't count on Luce--a born risk-taker with a ruthless streak--who ventures into the rum-work himself and tries to pull his sister into it with him. But Bridge--headstrong and capable (as well as a petty thief)--embarks on a different course, when she falls in love with Henry Vonniker, an outsider from a higher social class. Vonniker is gentle and brilliant but irrevocably scarred by his experiences as a doctor in World War I. A triangle develops, sharpened by Luce's hatred, his envy of Vonniker. As Bridge begins to move beyond the confines of their known world, Luce slips easily into the darker undercurrents of the illegal liquor trade, a complex perversion of big-city syndicates, middlemen, hijackers, subject to a code of outlaw American justice. And Bridge must choose between the man she loves and the brother to whom she has been loyal all her life. As Bridge strikes out on her own, Luce's fierce attachment to her spirals out of control.

Exquisitely written, haunting in its rendering of place, The Season of Open Water is a superb novel about a family and the lawlessness of the heart, a love story that explores the often inescapable connections between violence and desire.