Books Sandwiched In: Virtual Author Talks at Noon

DeSales Harrison - The Waters and The Wild

DeSales Harrison joins us to discuss poetry and his book, The Waters and The Wild.

DeSales Harrison is an Associate Professor of English at Oberlin College. His teaching centers around lyric poetry, with an emphasis on modern and contemporary work. He is the Director of the Oberlin Program in Creative Writing as well as the author of The End of the Mind: The Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larkin, Plath, and Glück, and a number of articles on modern and contemporary poetry. The Waters and The Wild is his first novel.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Daniel Abend is a single parent in New York City, with a successful therapy practice and a comfortable life: an apartment on the Upper West Side, a teenage daughter, a peaceful daily routine. When one of his patients commits suicide, it is a tragedy, but one easily explained: The young woman suffered from depression and drug addiction.

But soon after, Daniel receives an ominous note that makes him question the circumstances surrounding his patient’s death. He is provided with a provocative series of clues—a mysterious key, a cryptic poem, a photograph with a chilling message. A few days later, his daughter abruptly disappears.

Daniel is swept into an increasingly desperate search for his daughter, and for the truth—a search that stretches back decades, to when he was a young man living in Paris, falling in love with a woman who would ultimately upend his life. As he is tormented by a steady flow of anonymous letters, Daniel recognizes that he must confront the secrets of his past: There is a debt to be paid, an account to be settled.