In Bodies of Water, my latest short story collection, water becomes the setting for decisions that cannot be postponed. These stories ask what happens when grief, love, and responsibility meet at the same shoreline.
Water gathers in every story here, but it never means just one thing. It is a creek carrying the residue of a city, a river glimpsed at dawn, a harbor holding old departures, an estuary crowded with celebration, and a reservoir shrunken by drought. Around each one, Marylee MacDonald places people facing the moment when the life they know can no longer remain unchanged.
Across fourteen linked-by-theme stories, readers meet characters whose turning points are quiet but consequential: a blind man learning to trust the world again, a widow bargaining with an Amish carpenter, a craftsman waiting decades for the return of what was stolen, and a woman following a stranger through Vancouver’s midnight streets until she discovers a way to release the past.
For readers drawn to the emotional precision of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and the vivid, unsentimental humanity of Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, Bodies of Water offers a bittersweet passage through grief, belonging, and the choices that reshape our lives.
Learn more here: www.linktr.ee/maryleemacdonald