Still Water

Trey Graves has been planning for nine weeks.On Saturday, he and his father will take their annual fishing trip to the lake on the family's eleven-thousand-acre Delta property — the same lake, the same boat, the same tradition they've kept since Trey was five. Except this time, Trey has mapped the depths, studied the water temperature, and checked the motor. This time, only one of them is coming back.Lawton Graves Sr. knows his son is broken. The bar in Oxford, the outfitting business in Jackson, the DUIs, the rehab in Hattiesburg — every failure met with another check, another offer, another open door. He believes the fishing trip will bring Trey back. He has bought new lures. He has chosen the sandwiches. He does not understand that help, extended without limit, becomes a cage.Catherine Graves sees everything. She has always seen everything. And she has been building something of her own — quietly, patiently, with the precision of a woman who is good with things that grow slowly.Told across seven days in the Mississippi Delta, Still Water is a novel about inheritance and control, about the distance between provision and love, and about the still surface that reveals nothing while holding everything beneath it.