It’s All About Water

This is the first novel in a three-part series of voice-driven literary fiction centered on Colm and Phillipa, their courtship and marriage, and the large, complicated family world they inhabit. The story moves among Ireland, New York, and France in the early twentieth century, following not only the central couple but also the lives, histories, loyalties, and entanglements of the people around them.

The novel has an expansive, highly associative narrator whose voice is part of the experience. It moves freely among comedy, lyricism, folklore, Catholic ritual, history, science, family anecdote, and the mysteries of memory. Its structure is episodic and interconnected rather than strictly linear: scenes and stories accumulate, echo one another, and sometimes reveal their significance much later.

At its heart, this is a story about love in the fullest sense—not only romantic love, but the bonds between parents and children, cousins and siblings, friends and generations. As Colm and Phillipa move from the exhilaration of first love into marriage and parenthood, they carry the histories, attachments, and unresolved grievances of their families into the life they build together. Their story unfolds amid the comedy and disorder of a crowded family world, the enduring pull of places left behind, and the joys and losses that alter what home means. What begins with two people finding one another becomes a story about the many lives that make a life, and the memories that continue to shape it.