“Hope” is one of those words, filled with longing and expectation and optimism, it should be the most powerful thing on the planet usually, however, it seems to settle somewhere between a warm-and-fuzzy idea and a laudable emotion, granted little more than inclusion in the good words category and left at that.īut in the evocatively-charged debut novel by Nathan Harris, The Sweetness of Water, hope is earth-stridingly powerful, an emotion so replete with the capacity to overturn mountains and send obstacles tumbling helplessly out of its way that very little can stand in its way.Īnd that kind of epic shove-the-darkness-comprehensively-aside power is precisely what’s needed in the town of Old Ox, Georgia in the aftermath of the cataclysmic disruptiveness of the American Civil War which has left the defeated South not only licking its open wounds, but awash in the kind of societal change that causes chaos on a grandly unsettling scale. There are some words that are thrown around with such giddy abandon and greeting card snappiness that we’re apt to see them as lightweight sentiments that have no real substance and can bear no real weight. (cover image courtesy Hachette Australia)
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