This month, we’re reading a novel about two communities—Cajuns in Louisiana and a Tamil immigrant family in Toronto—dealing with the rigors of life in North America.
Let the Water Take Us
Stephanie Soileau (Doubleday, 336 pp., $30, July 2026)
This month, we’re reading a novel about two communities—Cajuns in Louisiana and a Tamil immigrant family in Toronto—dealing with the rigors of life in North America.
Let the Water Take Us
Stephanie Soileau (Doubleday, 336 pp., $30, July 2026)
Stephanie Soileau’s first novel, Let the Water Take Usit begins and ends in the same place: a house in the bayous of southern Louisiana, on a stormy night. At the beginning of the book, it is 1893, and what seems to be Hurricane Cheniere Caminada it is about to strike, taking with it the whole community. In 2010, a relative of a family whose house miraculously survived prepares to face another.
Let the Water Take Us is an epic about the exploitation of the environment and the disasters it causes. Most of the story takes place in 2010 in the fictional Louisiana community of Pelerin Parish. Many residents are proud to be Cajuns, “the French-speaking descendants of the restless, careless Acadians driven from New France (in what is now Nova Scotia) more than a century before.”
The protagonists of Soileau are contending with the explosion of the oil rig explosion that it actually refers to Deep water Horizon spillworst disaster in US history. “God brought a cloud of ashes and a flood of oil from the womb of the earth,” he writes. Soileau, himself a Cajun, also includes historical nuggets that add an ancestral perspective to the main plot, such as the opening chapter about the storm of 1893.
The 2010 eruption is not only harming the natural environment—it is also endangering people’s lives. In many ways, southern Louisiana is bound by its abundant natural resources: “The blessing of oil, the curse of oil. The wealth that saves and the wealth that destroys,” Soileau writes. The residents of Pelerin Parish are very dependent on the oil industry economically and are disgusted by it, they are powerless in the face of corporate greed. Soileau mentions ExxonMobil by name several times throughout the book.
After the explosion, a single mother who worked as a mechanic to care for her daughter was suddenly traumatized and out of a job, and coaxed into signing a waiver preventing her from suing her employer for damages. (“(J)ust the kind of shenanigans the oil industry would pull,” Soileau writes.) The oyster farmer can no longer cultivate or sell his contaminated product. And some residents in the community—a “predominantly white” place—are reacting to the influx of Black and Latino sanitation workers from elsewhere in the state with racism.
As Pelerin Parish begins to regain its footing, the hurricane’s dangers barrel toward the Louisiana coast. The injury Hurricane Katrina it’s still fresh as Soileau’s characters play the game once again.
Let the Water Take Us it is alternately read as regional and international. For many characters, even a trip to New Orleans is an international assignment. But Soileau is careful to emphasize that the hardships of the locals do not occur in a vacuum, especially when the economy runs on oil.
In addition to the scenes in Canada and France—the text is written in French—Soileau briefly takes the characters to Nigeria. The Catholic priest in Pelerin Parish is Nigerian and grew up near an oil refinery, but the disaster in the country did not make headlines. The priest reflects on the difference between his two homes: “Every year in the Niger Delta, an Exxon Valdez. Every year for forty years. Niger Delta? No one is watching. America is not Nigeria. Everyone is watching.”
The oil spill is—of course—ugly, but Soileau’s prose about it is beautiful and moving. “A rainbow with particles of the appearance of a stream,” he writes in one case; in another, “(of) wealth shows rain on their heads.” There may be an ironic logic to that discrepancy. As one of Soileau’s characters points out, the names of oil plants are often very ironic. “Bronze Light, Field of Bright Water, something like that, very good for that purpose,” he writes.— Joh.Allison Meakem
Hustle, Baby: A Novel
Priya Guns (Doubleday, 304 pp., $30, July 2026)
“As far back as I can remember, I was a hustler,” recounts the protagonist of Priya Guns’ new novel. “Hustling was in my blood because my cells were formed during the shelling, and my mother had to run so we wouldn’t die that day.”
The American dream—and by extension, the immigrant dream—has always been predictable. In Hustle, BabyGuns add to that fact. His novel has the spirit of Glengarry Glen RossDavid Mamet’s 1980s businessman drama, in which a group of hucksters use crooked tactics in pursuit of the good life (or a Cadillac, at least). This time, however, the main characters are a family of refugees who fled the Sri Lankan civil war and are just trying to get by in Toronto. They are as foul-mouthed as Mamet’s wheeler-dealers, but the stakes are higher.
The pillar of Hustle, Baby it is direct. It’s October 2000, and the family has until 9 a.m. on December 15 to pay the landlord again or face eviction. Each of them have their own methods of making quick money as the clock ticks by: Dilo, the main character, charges his classmates for snacks and canned coffee; his mother puts her faith in God (and helps the family steal valuables from the local Walmart managers); and his aunt, a straight-talking ex-Tamil Tiger resistance fighter, tries to get in on the local scandal. All three are confronted by a scammer, who promises endless returns on investment through an obscure day trading scheme.
Guns exploded onto the literary scene with his 2023 debut novel, Your Driver Is Waitinggender-swapped original film Taxi driver. Hustle, Baby it further enhances the feverish and ruthless tone of the book. If many immigrant novels evoke feelings of longing for the homeland, Gun is quick to dismiss this notion. “(D) don’t put this in a sad story,” the mother thinks. “I’m from heaven, that’s true. But it was a place with poisonous snakes, landmines and bullets flying. There wasn’t a family that didn’t know someone who had died from a snake bite or two…who didn’t know someone who had been killed.”
The gun also has a feel for American life at the turn of the millennium: There’s a cathedral attraction, a young kid whose favorite program is news, a woman driving around in a pink Caddy emblazoned with “Chiclets” after joining a multi-level marketing scheme. Not to mention ambition and danger and an early internet live game full of dialogue. Indeed, little in this book is a trick. As Dilo recounts earlier, “We ran straight from bombs to cancer and consumption.” But as the action progresses, and reaches its dark (perhaps gratuitous) climax, it’s hard not to appreciate Gun’s performance, his relentless questioning of the grim realities of modern life.—Jn.Chloe Hadavas
July Released, Briefly
The highly anticipated sequel to Scottish author Irvine Welsh’s 1993 classic. Train advertising, Men in Loveto reach the US market. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s new noir, Intriguefollows the adventures of a con man in 1940s Mexico. A summer retreat in an English mansion is spoiled in Imogen Crimp’s contemporary setting, Give Me Everything You’ve Got. the debut novel by French New Wave filmmaker Éric Rohmer, Elizabethtranslated into English by Aaron Kerner. Bora Lee Reed’s first novel, Another House Songtells the story of a family caught up in the Korean War.
Jan Carson’s name Few and Far Between offers an alternative (and disturbing) history of Northern Ireland. Russian spy ring infiltrates Washington BetrayersOld school thriller by Robert B. McCaw. Tamil writer Jeyamohan’s The White Elephanttranslated by Priyamvada Ramkumar, gives a post-colonial dimension Heart of Darkness. In Valeria Luiselli The Beginning of the Middle Endmother and daughter duos explore history big and small on a trip to Sicily. And the Venezuelan writer Maria Elena Morán begins in the English language with Maracaibo Windtranslated by Madeline Jones.CH
