MARK BARR

WATERSHED

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Set in 1937 in rural Tennessee, with the construction of a monumental dam serving as background—a cinematically biblical effort to harness elemental forces and bring power to the people—Watershed delivers a gripping story of characters whose ambitions and yearnings threaten to overflow the banks of their time and place.

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"A powerful debut...readers looking for vivid historicals full of emotional turmoil in the vein of Wallace Stegner will enjoy this impressive novel."
―Publishers Weekly

"Lives diverted from their original paths play out against the backdrop of rivers diverted from their original banks during the Tennessee Valley Authority project...Barr sheds light on a unique episode in American history while illuminating the stories of two sympathetic characters." ―Kirkus

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“Mark Barr’s vivid and heartfelt Watershed is the most engrossing and assured debut I’ve read in a long, long time. The building of the hydroelectric dam in 1937 Tennessee isn’t the backdrop in this riveting story―it drives everything. A hydroelectric dam engineer running from his past. A Tennessee housewife running toward a new life. You watch a countryside, a people, transformed. The dam truly brings so much more than electricity. Watershed will leave you charged and enlightened. Mark Barr is a powerhouse."―Smith Henderson, author of Fourth of July Creek

"Written with uncommon humanity and grace, Watershed is a powerful reminder of how necessary those qualities are in our own time. Mark Barr has an almost supernatural ability to make the past―both the physical and emotional realities of daily life―intimate and real. Watershed is like one of the great New Deal murals brought to passionate, striving life." ―Kent Wascom, author of The New Inheritors

"In Mark Barr’s engrossing historical novel Watershed, personal and social changes lead to tension in a rural Tennessee town where a post-Depression federal dam project brings work, strangers, and electricity to the region.The dam’s holdups raise the stakes of the story, and waiting to learn the characters’ fates, which are wrapped up in the success of the project, makes this historical tale gripping."―Foreword Magazine

“Watershed is a novel about change in many forms―personal, technological, and societal―and it handles them all with aplomb. A quintessentially American story of invention and reinvention in hard times, it reveals Barr as a writer of uncommon grace, skill, and promise.”―Doug Dorst, author of S (with JJ Abrams)

"Fluidly paced, unsettling yet graceful, Watershed is a riveting debut that never lets up. Barr packs these pages with incident and character and a deep emotional intelligence; this is one of those rare novels that hit you with such startling clarity that the events of the story feel like your own memories." ― Kelly Luce, author of Pull Me Under