Read by Eileen Stevens & Mark Bramhall

Set during the devastating Memorial Day floods in Texas, a surreal, empathetic novel for readers of Station Eleven and The Age of Miracles. 2015. Eighteen-year-old Boyd Montgomery returns from her grandfather's wedding to find her friend Isaac missing. Drought-ravaged central Texas has been newly inundated with rain, and flash floods across the state have begun to sweep away people, cars, and entire houses as every river breaks its banks. In the midst of the rising waters, Boyd sets out across the ravaged back country. She is determined to rescue her missing friend, and she's not alone in her quest: her neighbor Carla spots Boyd's boot prints leading away from the safety of home and follows in her path. Hours later, her mother returns to find Boyd missing, and she, too, joins the search. Boyd, Carla, and Lucy Maud know the land well. They've lived in central Texas for their entire lives. But they have no way of knowing the fissure the storm has opened along the back roads, no way of knowing what has been erased-and what has resurfaced. As they each travel through the newly unfamiliar landscape, they discover the ghosts of Texas past and present. Haunting and timely, Things You Would Know if You Grew Up Around Here considers questions of history and empathy and brings a pre-apocalyptic landscape both foreign and familiar to shockingly vivid life. "This strange brew of a book…is shot through with magical realism and undergirded by a naturalist's concern for Mother Earth-and it's all wrapped in lovely sentences. Book groups will have field days discussing this." "By turns magical, harshly realistic, poetic, aggravating, and enthralling." "Fabulous and engrossing, both faithful to the real-world details of central Texas and wildly imaginative…Dinan's storytelling flows as forcefully as a flash flood in this spellbinding first novel…An extraordinary novel." "Proof that the finest American novelist of her generation has taken the stage. Wayson Dinan has created characters so real we can't help but fall in love with them." "In this myth-like journey, the earth comes alive, the past breaks its bonds, and a girl who understands the deepest griefs of strangers sets out on a desperate search to save a friend." "In this astonishing debut novel, dream and dread and hope braid into a single, unforgettable tale. It washes away old boundaries and creates a world that is new, slightly menacing, and thrilling." "Precise and full-hearted, reverently attentive to the natural world, and woven through with subtle magic. Like the cataclysmic storm that sets this book in motion, Wayson Dinan's stunning debut will carry readers clean away." "A harrowing descent into a central Texas underworld. Wayson Dinan's novel will drown you with beauty and grief."

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