High as the Waters Rise Audiobook By Anja Kampmann, Anne Posten - translator cover art

High as the Waters Rise

A Novel

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High as the Waters Rise

By: Anja Kampmann, Anne Posten - translator
Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
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About this listen

This National Book Award finalist is a dazzling, heart-rending story of an oil rig worker whose closest friend goes missing, plunging him into isolation and forcing him to confront his past.

One night aboard an oil drilling platform in the Atlantic, Waclaw returns to his cabin to find that his bunkmate and companion, Mátyás, has gone missing. A search of the rig confirms his fear that Mátyás has fallen into the sea.

Grief-stricken, he embarks on an epic emotional and physical journey that takes him to Morocco, to Budapest and Mátyás’s hometown in Hungary, to Malta, Italy, and finally to the mining town of his childhood in Germany. Waclaw’s encounters along the way with other lost and yearning souls - Mátyás’s angry, grieving half-sister; lonely rig workers on shore leave; a truck driver who watches the world change from his driver’s seat - bring us closer to his origins while also revealing the problems of a globalized economy dependent on waning natural resources. High as the Waters Rise is a stirring exploration of male intimacy, the nature of memory and grief, and the cost of freedom - the story of a man who stands at the margins of a society from which he has profited little, though its functioning depends on his labor.

©2018 by Anja Kampmann. English translation © 2019 by Anne Posten. (P)2021 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Fiction Friendship Literary Fiction Small Town & Rural Heartfelt
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Critic reviews

"In her debut novel, German poet Kampmann touchingly and intimately illustrates the fallout of capitalism’s dependence on oil . . . This is a haunting exploration of the devastating costs all kinds of gig workers have to bear to feed themselves and the belly of the beast." --Booklist

"The story of a man at the edge, a story of displacement and existential loneliness told with restraint . . . A poet’s novel in the richness of its imagery and the exquisiteness of the language." --Library Journal

"A quiet but powerful novel . . . Kampmann’s characters are memorable; her dialogue spare but realistic. Her prose, ably translated by Posten, isn’t showy, but it’s quite pretty and, at times, gorgeous . . . A thoughtful, unsparing look at loss . . . A promising fiction debut with understated but beautiful writing." --Kirkus Reviews

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