Things We Found When the Water Went Down

In this dark and ethereal debut novel, a young woman tries to make sense of strange artifacts and unsettling memories in an effort to find her mother — missing since being accused of murder

When brutish miner Hugo Mitchum is found murdered on the frozen shore of a North Country lake, the local officials and town gossips of Beau Caelais are quick to blame Marietta Abernathy, outspoken environmental activist and angry, witchy recluse. But Marietta herself has disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Living on an isolated island with her father, Marietta's sixteen-year-old daughter, Lena, begins sifting through her mother's journals and collected oddities in an attempt to find her. While her father's grief threatens to consume him and her adoptive aunt Bea reckons with guilt and acceptance, it is the haunting town outcast Ellis Olsen who might have the most to lose if Lena fails to find her mother.

A Nordic eco-noir shot through with magical realism, Things We Found When the Water Went Down examines power, identity, and myth in a story that asks us to explore what it means to heal — or not — after violence.

"Atmospheric...Though Swanson's novel includes news stories, police interviews, and other elements of a detective story, it resists easy categorization...An inventive and beguiling debut." — Kirkus Reviews

"Intriguing and inventive...Swanson's novel explores themes of violence against women, small town prejudice, and corporate disregard in fascinating and unexpected ways that fans of stylish, experimental fiction will appreciate." — Booklist

"Tegan Nia Swanson's debut is a multi-faceted excavation of inherited trauma in both the spiritual and physical world that asks if regrowth is possible after immolation and offers no easy answers. In shifting forms and propulsive language, she captures the impossibility of history, the fierce pride of so-called otherness, and the dream of a gentler world. Immersive, heartbreaking, and cathartic." — Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House

TEGAN NIA SWANSON is an advocate, educator, artist, gardener, and UU-Buddhist, most at home while in or near large bodies of water, or walking under the canopies of many trees. Things We Found When the Water Went Down is her first novel.