Bodies of Water

"What really stands out is MacDonald's gift for creating believable, deeply human characters … You'll find yourself thinking about a character long after you've turned the page." — A Wishing Shelf Book Review

"… the stories are united by the author's interest in people ... finding common ground across cultural and generational divides." — Kirkus Reviews

Bodies of Water collects fourteen stories from a writer who has spent a lifetime paying attention.

A woman chases her ex-lover's car through the dark streets of Vancouver. A blind carpenter receives a cupcake from a stranger who wipes his fingers one by one. A widow negotiates with an Amish carpenter to build her an ark. A Greek fisherman rescues two African migrants from the sea and then sails on, carrying them with him like ballast.

In Bodies of Water, fourteen stories move across four continents and as many decades, finding in each body of water — a toxic Chicago creek, the Ganges at dawn, a Bahamian resort, a dry sluice channel in the Ore Mountains of East Germany — a mirror for the lives of people who are trying, with varying degrees of success, to stay afloat.

These are stories about what we inherit and what we lose, about the grief we carry in silence and the grace that arrives unexpectedly, about the moment when a person stands at the edge of something and decides — or fails to decide — to trust that now is the right time to jump. A phlebotomist in Vancouver. A wood turner in Saxony. A yoga student in Rishikesh.  A union carpenter in a wheelchair. A retired firefighter burying his ventriloquist's dummy in a garden in Culver City, California. A guy on an oil rig in the middle of the North Atlantic.

Precise, compassionate, and often unexpectedly funny, Bodies of Water is a collection about the water we swim in, the water that shapes us, and the water we are always, in one way or another, trying to cross.