Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River

Maclean (Fire on the Mountain) offers a lyrical love letter to Montana’s Blackfoot River, fishing, and his storied family in this captivating memoir. His father Norman Maclean’s 1976 novella, A River Runs Through It, brought the area worldwide attention and unpacked the murder of Norman’s brother, Paul. With this narrative as an inspiration, Maclean chronicles his relationship with the river, beginning with his ancestors’ move from Scotland to northwestern Montana, where the family built a cabin a century ago. Though Maclean’s job as a journalist forced him to leave Montana in the ’70s, he returned to Blackfoot often. Like his father, he “needed both worlds, a high-powered intellectual life and the life of the woods and rivers.” He shares family stories passed through the generations—such as one about losing a fish in the car of his father’s friend—as well as the “conflicting stories and wild rumors” around his enigmatic uncle Paul, who some believed was murdered because of gambling debts. Fans of his father’s novella will relish the details that served as its inspiration and are here rendered in Maclean’s sharp yet poetic prose as tribute to a “pantheon of notable family fishers.” This richly observed narrative is sure to reel readers in. Agent: Jennifer Lyons, Jennifer Lyons Literary. (June)