Underlake - Large Print by Erin L McCoy (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A richly glittering debut about the interlocked fates of two women, raised worlds apart, who must join forces on an extraordinary journey diving leagues beneath the water's surface --and straight into the fathomless heart of fear, forgiveness, and love.

Thirteen years ago, Otta escaped the small town of Steels, intent upon becoming a marine biologist. Now she's returned having failed to achieve her dream, and carrying the guilt of a friend's death during a deep-sea dive. She thinks she may never dive again, but then a stranger appears at her door.

This stranger, May, says that her daughter has run away, and insists that she's under a nearby lake -- alive.

Because it turns out the small-town legend of "the underlake" is true: three decades ago, an entire valley and the town in it was flooded to make way for a dam, but the people in that town refused to leave.
Now, they're still living beneath the lake, self-proclaimed "refugees of a world obsessed with change," connected --and held apart --by an intricate, airtight system of tubes and sealed buildings. To find May's missing daughter, Otta and May must travel deeper and deeper under the water. Along the way, they'll discover communities that have lived in isolation for decades, fomenting extremes of delusion and nostalgia. As the two women bond in the thrall of their search, they are each forced to confront the layers of fear, control, and uncertainty that drive their quest. Together and alone, they must challenge the laws of love and society --and push their bodies to the mortal limit.

Hypnotic and arresting, Underlake asks how do we claim our place on the great timeline of history, and who do we erase in the process? It brings a poet's attention to language, gesturing at the evocative and ethereal work of Preeta Samarasan and Marilynne Robinson, while also shrewdly exploring the American obsession with inheritance, property, and race. Finally, Underlake is a powerful meditation on what is possible when women reach through time, space, and memory to relate to one another.

Review Quotes

"Eerie and mesmerizing, Underlake is a journey into the deepest recesses of American society and the human heart. Erin L. McCoy guides the reader through lightless tunnels and shimmering pools, charting an underwater world of communities living in extreme isolation. At each step, this book illuminates how faith, language, and truth can warp or sharpen under extraordinary pressure. This is a spellbinding exploration of the risks we take for love, reminiscent of the survival story in Women Talking and the labyrinthine mysteries of Piranesi. A breathtaking and unforgettable debut about what happens when the water rises and when the water runs out."
-Susanna Kwan, author of Awake in the Floating City

About the Author

Erin L. McCoy grew up in a small town outside of Louisville, Kentucky, and is a poet, an editor, and a proofreader (including for Penguin Random House). Her debut poetry collection, Wrecks, was a finalist for the Noemi Book Award. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Narrative, Conjunctions, Bennington Review, the American Poetry Review, and she has twice been published in the Best New Poets anthology. She has also won nearly two dozen awards in photojournalism. Currently, she serves as acquisitions editor at Entre Ríos Books, where she focuses on discovering Argentine poets for translation, and as an assistant editor at Narrative. Formerly, she was an assistant poetry editor and fiction reader for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature & Fine Arts. After a decade in Seattle, she currently lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.