Marsh Me

When Joey, a loner whose life consists of home, school, and the hill where he plays guitar, meets Marsh, she opens his eyes to a new world.

For fans of Where the Crawdads Sing, this “marvelous debut” (Alice McDermott, National Book Award–winning author of The Ninth Hour) follows a Washington, DC, artist as she faces her past and the secrets held in the waters of Florida’s lush swamps and wetlands. Loni Murrow is an accomplished bird artist at the Smithsonian who loves her job. But when she receives a call from her younger brother summoning her back home to help their obstinate mother recover after an accident, Loni’s neat, contained life in Washington, DC, is thrown into chaos, and she finds herself exactly where she does not want to be. Going through her mother’s things, Loni uncovers scraps and snippets of a time in her life she would prefer to forget—a childhood marked by her father Boyd’s death by drowning. When Loni comes across a single, cryptic note from a stranger—“There are some things I have to tell you about Boyd’s death”—she begins a dangerous quest to discover the truth, all the while struggling to reconnect with her mother and reconcile with her brother and his wife. To make matters worse, she meets a man whose attractive simple charm threatens to pull her back towards everything she’s worked to escape. Torn between worlds—her professional accomplishments in Washington, and the small town of her childhood—Loni must decide whether to delve beneath the surface into murky half-truths and avenge the past or bury it, once and for all. “Fans of Delia Owens and Lauren Groff will find this a wonderful and absorbing read” (Suzanne Feldman, author of Sisters of the Great War).

Dr Salim, of Bagdad University, spent two years amongst the remarkable tribal peoples who inhabit the great marshes of the lower Euphrates. He describes their social and economic organization and discusses on the one hand the process by which people with bedouin traditions and values have adapted themselves to different and difficult conditions, and on the other the effects upon them of submission to the central government and the modernisation of their modes of life that has resulted from it. His account offers a fascinating study of people living in an unusual environment, and will be of value to the anthropologist and ethnologist for its precise ethnography. At the same time, as one of the few detailed studies of the changes now being wrought on such a large scale by modern economic and political forces, it has real importance for the general student of contemporary Middle Eastern affairs.

During the years he spent among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq Wilfred Thesiger came to understand, admire and share a way of life that had endured for many centuries. Travelling from village to village by canoe, he won acceptance by dispensing medicines and treating the sick. In this account of his time there he pays tribute to the hospitality, loyalty, courage and endurance of the people, describes their impressive reed houses, the waterways and lakes teeming with wildlife, the herding of buffalo and hunting of wild boar, moments of tragedy and moments of pure comedy, all in vivid, engaging detail. Untouched by the modern world until recently, these independent people, their way of life and their surroundings have suffered widespread destruction under the regime of Saddam Hussein. Wilfred Thesiger's magnificent account of his time spent among them is a moving testament to their now threatened culture and the landscape they inhabit.