Before the Water Takes Us: A Novel of Vanishing Gulf Coast

They have ninety days to decide whether to sell their island to the sea.Paloma Island has six hundred and eleven residents, one causeway, and a federal offer on the table: sell every house, dissolve the town, and go.Dr. Mara Valdez grew up there. She left at twenty-two on a one-way ticket and built a career measuring coastlines like her own. Now the state has sent her home to run the numbers, and to collect what a town wants remembered before the water takes it.Owen Mercer never left. He has kept his father's marina open for twelve years, since the night the storm came and Eli Mercer walked out onto the harbor dock and did not come back. The same night Mara flew north.They have not spoken since the funeral.Over one Gulf Coast summer, Mara records six hundred lives: a church register, a recipe box, a growth chart cut from beneath a diner floor, a list of what each family will carry out. Owen holds open the door of a place that is closing. And the vote comes whether either of them is ready.A luminous, unsentimental novel about the difference between a house and a home, and about what we owe the people who stayed.