River in the House

Inspired by true accounts of Tropical Storm Irene’s devastation of central Vermont in 2011, a novel-in-stories about the secrets that surface when a catastrophic storm takes a rural community by surprise.

“Water coming down from everywhere there’s an up—sky, hills, trees, roofs. Waterfalls where there never was a stream before in the history of the world. A cow tumbled by in what used to be called the river.”

In a rural Vermont mountain town, climate change is transformed from a distant threat into a present-day catastrophe as residents fight to outlast a flood. While the water surges, cutting the town off from the rest of the world, the characters in each of these intertwined stories grapple with the urgency and danger of the present while unearthing truths that tether them to the past and to each other. A farmhand searching for his missing girlfriend tries to rescue a barnful of heifers. A man whose daughter drowned years ago helps a woman give birth in the bathroom of a flooding plywood factory. A pair of tourists find themselves trapped in a cemetery as the river rises around them. And when a son returns home out of fear that his parents have drowned, he is instead reunited with the sister he hasn’t seen in over a decade.

Against the backdrop of the storm, Tracy Winn unearths the hidden lives of the town’s residents, offering a portrait of an economically disadvantaged yet ecologically rich place, and the disastrous impact climate change has on rural communities. Poignant, honest, and achingly human, River in the House masterfully weaves together individual stories to reveal how tragedy transforms the personal into the communal.