Michigan Notable Book and best-selling author Bonnie Jo Campbell will be speaking about her book The Waters: A Novel on Friday, May 23th at 11 am. Hailed as one of Oprah’s most immersive books of 2024 and featured in Roxane Gay’s newsletter, “The Audacity”, The Waters takes place in the fictional Great Massasauga Swamp—an area known as “The Waters” to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan. 

Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event from Parallel 45 Books and Gifts. 

About the book:

“In the Great Massasauga Swamp near Whiteheart, Mich., the eccentric herbalist Hermine “Herself” Zook has long been a healer, inspiring both awe and fear in the local community and her three estranged daughters. Her youngest daughter, Rose Thorn, abandons her 11-year-old daughter, Dorothy “Donkey” Zook, who grows up isolated and searching for answers in nature and her math books. As tensions rise in the divided community, family secrets, and violent men disrupt Donkey’s childhood, with Rose Thorn acting as the only bridge between the two sides.”

About the author:

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel The Waters, was the January selection for the Today Show’s “Read with Jenna” Book Club. It was also featured in Oprah Daily’s list of “Best Books of 2024” and “Best Books of Spring” and received high praise from Booklist, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, and others. The Waters was also recently honored with a Michigan Notable Book Award. Other novels include Once Upon a River, a National Bestseller which was adapted into a full-length feature film in 2020, and Q. Road. Her critically acclaimed short fiction collections include American Salvage, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Women and Other Animals, winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction; and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. She was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow whose other honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Eudora Welty Prize, and the Mark Twain Award. She lives outside Kalamazoo with her husband and two donkeys. Visit www.bonniejocampbell.net