The principal characters experience the fallout of divisive social change and the sense of loss it creates in their lives. In the background, white landowners and merchants deal with their loss of independence and a way of life under the oversight of the Union, while Black people try to adapt to newfound freedom for which they are unprepared and that the whites do not accept. Then there is a complex struggle between August and Caleb, who is fearful of being judged for his desertion and tortured by the possibility of rejection by his former friend. In contrast is the close relationship between Prentiss, intelligent, hard-working, determined to reunite his family, and Landry, the victim of frequent whippings that have made him lose any reason to speak. There is the strained marriage of George, a loner and an outcast in the town, haunted by images of a beast from his childhood, and Isabelle, who feels abandoned and troubled by George’s lack of affection and appreciation. Three intersecting relationships are deftly portrayed in parallel throughout the novel.

After the two men are discovered having a sexual encounter in the woods, a murder leads to upheaval in the lives of George, Isabelle, Prentiss, and Caleb.

Caleb returns home, hoping to rekindle a relationship with his childhood friend August Webler, who served with Caleb and knows of his desertion. Meanwhile, George and his wife Isabelle are mourning the loss of their son Caleb in the Civil War, only to discover that he had deserted the Confederate army and survived. The brothers agree to work on Walker’s land to earn enough money to travel North and search for the mother who was sold when they were boys. Two formerly enslaved brothers, Prentiss and Landry, leave the Morton plantation after the announcement of Emancipation and are discovered by homesteader George Walker living in the woods near his property. The novel begins at the end of the Civil War near the town of Old Ox, Georgia. With its rich characterization and exquisite prose, The Sweetness of Water shows us that history and its inhabitants are incapable of forgetting a disturbing past but nonetheless capable of moving on. The story immerses the reader in a trying period of history – the beginnings of Reconstruction in the American South – where the loss of a way of life, however judged, parallels the sense of loss of the human characters. The Sweetness of Waterby Nathan Harris is an impressive debut novel that explores the raw trauma of social change and a collective of human lives, each in its own transition.

The sweetness of water nathan harris