Coming in 2025 from St. Martin’s Press
When the world collapses, will our love for each other? Eiren Caffall answers the hard questions in this luminous novel. The Weight of All the Water in the World is a masterful story of a family fighting to not be drowned by a changing world. Each sentence is a treasure. Read this and be changed.
—Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Child Finder and Sleeping Giants
THE WEIGHT OF ALL THE WATER IN THE WORLD has everything: stunning prose, wonderful characters, powerful themes, and a plot that moves like a freight train. I have rarely encountered a story that deals so deftly with the climate crisis, asking essential questions and refusing to settle for simple answers. Thirteen-year-old Nonie, the novel’s narrator and heart, spins a tale that will make you think, bring you to tears, keep you on the edge of your seat, and leave you buzzing. Read this book immediately.
—Abby Geni, author of The Lightkeepers, The Wildlands, and The Body Farm (2024)
Along with its gorgeous language, its deeply human characters, its stay up all night ’cause you have to know what happens storytelling, [All the Water in the World] does the goddamn impossible. It makes the climate crisis real. Devastatingly, terrifyingly, gloriously real. Eiren Caffall is a masterfulful storyteller.
—Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life.
A gorgeously written novel that tackles not just the climate condition, but the human one. Narrated by Nonie, a young member of a family in the near future, The Weight of All the Water in the World tells the story of their escape from their dwelling, which just happens to be the top of the Museum of Natural History (called Amen) until after a fierce super storm makes it inhabitable, forcing them to flee to what they desperately hope is going to be safety. This is one brilliant and engrossing book—and I’ll say my heartfelt “Amen” to that.
—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and Days of Wonder
I am gripped by Eiren Caffall’s river-going adventure tale. It moves through darkness like the beam of a flashlight: urgent, questing, incandescent.
—Josephine Ferorelli, co-author of The Conceivable Future: Planning Families and Taking Action in the Age of Climate Change
With its beautiful sentences and a propulsive plot, The Weight of All the Water in the World, asks us how we continue to love both a world in environmental crisis and each other through that crisis. This is an essential novel for our times. Nonie, the young, neuro-divergent, main character will whisper in my ears for a very long time and that is the most powerful work a book can do.
—Nayomi Munaweera- award-winning author of Island of a Thousand Mirrors and What Lies Between Us
Like flipping through a series of gorgeous, half ruined, and increasingly terrifying snapshots – the kind you might find washed up after apocalyptic flooding – Eiren Caffall’s exquisite novel of climate disaster and human tenderness has you trembling, turning pages faster and faster, wanting more, even as you try to slow down and savor writing so precisely lovely it alone breaks your heart. Following a little family as they flee from the roof of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and strike out to find safety in an America besieged by storm and water, The Weight of All the Water in the World shares a profundity with our deepest myths. It is the story of the vengeance of the flood. It is The Grapes of Wrath. It is, like 1984, a cautionary tale of a “future” that we know, as we read, is already here. But it is also delicate, threaded through and through with beauty. Caffall is a magnificent prophet, a mighty voice . . . and, like Cassandra, strangely soothing in her soothsaying, simply because the story she tells is so desperately true.
—Bee Ridgway, author of The River of No Return