Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction 2006

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.

REVIEWS & PRAISE

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

"The story of a woman caught between the brother who completes her and the man she loves, The Season Of Open Water is a stunning, taut, richly textured novel. Tripp possesses a genius for the telling detail, and her characters are so intimately drawn that we can almost see their breath rise up off the page."
—Alison Smith, author of Name All The Animals

"Reading The Season Of Open Water is like returning for a second time to a beloved vacation spot. The place, the people, the smell of river at low tide…..yet a current of foreboding runs through this charming novel, written with a lyricism that sometimes approaches poetry…….Tripp's story is exquisite in every way – the marvelous characters, the heartbreaking plot, the soaring prose…..This is one of those books, the moment it's ended, you want to turn back to the beginning and start all over again." -
—The Orlando Sentinel

"Lyrical…Gripping…We are reminded that the American dream is as double branched as the Westport River."
—The Boston Globe

"Tripp proves that she is no one-book wonder after her well-received debut Moon Tide….Tripp's spare language is particularly appropriate to this time and place; she finds verbs that etch themselves into a reader's memory…and her plot unfolds with both surprises and what seems inevitable." —Booklist

"A gorgeously written and haunting novel."
—The Cape Codder

"Tripp has created a place that is as memorable to me as Charles Frazier's Smoky Mountains or Norman Maclean's Montana, and filled it with characters as lifelike as any I've encountered in contemporary American fiction. This is an absolutely wonderful story"
—Howard Frank Mosher, author of Where the Rivers Flow North

"In her second novel Tripp's writing is ethereal. It evokes visions of an era on the eve of the Great Depression ripe with poverty and despair....A unique and beautifully written novel."
–RT Book Reviews

"Tripp writes vivid, intense prose that opens a window on a particular place and time, a family and love story, with complex views that promise to delight and move us. In The Season of Open Water, she delivers on that promise, and keeps surprising us with more."
–Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Brave Enemies