Waterborne

Praise

"A formidable achievement, an engrossing story, masterfully told [and] filled with the knowledge and the craft of things. . . . Lyrical and evocative . . . a seamless and intricate work." —The Washington Post Book World

“Murkoff is enviably good at creating period-defining set pieces and driving his characters toward what . . . seem life’s inexorable collisions and collusions. . . . . He’s done a wonderful job of rendering the feel of the country during this despairing time.” —The New York Times Book Review

"Murkoff . . . has a formidable talent, and his cadenced, masculine style trails behind it echoes of Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy and . . . Charles Frazier."–San Francisco Chronicle

" Breathtaking. . . . Beautiful. . . . . A feat of literary engineering. . . . Murkoff has pooled a reservoir of suspense that threatens to burst through the covers of the book. . . . What a debut!”: —The Christian Science Monitor

"An achievement as big as Hoover Dam. . . . Murkoff captures [his] characters’ quiet desperation with a cinematic sensuality. . . . In short scenes that move the story along quickly, in language that is authoritative, yet understated, never drawing attention to itself, Murkoff is able to put us inside his characters’ heads, then he steps back to take in the sheer monumentality of the country’s woes, as craggy as a Western landscape. . . . Murkoff handles the majestic vision and the intimate moment with equal aplomb." —San Antonio Express-News

"A robust tale of loss and second chances . . . all played out against a majestic backdrop. What sets it apart is that the characters are not bold, glamorous seekers of independence and fortune. Their dreams are ordinary ones. It is through their attempts to overcome their isolation, to find the safe place they once had or should have had, that they inspire our interest and sympathy." —Boston Globe

"Heralds the arrival of an intriguing pentagenarian talent. . . . Murkoff’s prose style is vigorous and ruggedly American, inflected with a pinch of Bellow and DeLillo." —The Nation

"Vivid. . . . Sublime, precise prose. . . A complex, multi-voiced narrative, it meanders from character to character, from story to story, with a pull every bit as tenacious as a river current. . . . Bruce Murkoff has written a nuanced, persuasive first novel, memorably articulating the epic via the particular. . . . Waterborne is as much about the past as it is about moving on–it swirls in the eddies where memory and dream merge." —The New York Observer

"Crisp writing . . . astonishingly authentic prose. . . . . Murkoff is a skilled writer. Many of his single sentences do the work of whole pages. . . . Waterborne is well worth reading for the love story, for the ways characters come to heal from profound loss, and for the amazing evocation of place." —The Oregonian
 
"Fate, as implacable and unpredictable as a deadly storm, rolls and surges through Bruce Murkoff’s Waterborne, [a] richly detailed, moving novel of will and redemption . . . Without sacrificing suspense, Murkoff endows the story with a strong moral presence that emerges from character and action. . . . In rolling prose packed with detail that brings the 1930s alive, he sweeps us along toward a powerful and symbolic denouement." —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Evocative. . . . Waterborne reveals the instincts of a literary stylist. Murkoff . . . probes beneath the skin of his characters . . . and weaves spells with spot-on descriptions of the natural landscape. . . . He’s a master of cutting from one scene to the next and braiding the individual pieces together to form a cohesive whole. . . . A pleasure to read." —Seattle Times
  
"Waterborne is an almost unqualified success, both a panoramic view of an ailing nation and a penetrating character study of the soul-battered engineer at the story’s heart. I don’t know where Murkoff has been hiding out during his fifty years on the planet, but his talents as deft storyteller and writer of burnished prose are present on every page." –Dan Cryer, Newsday

"Murkoff’s descriptions of the mechanized and dangerous workplace . . . are tactile and even sensuous. His evocations of the natural world are too, [as] one of Murkoff’s strengths is in plain-stating the physicality, as opposed to the spirituality, of life." —Chicago Tribune

"Stunning. . . . Poignant. . . . A tour de force. . . . It is difficult to read this debut novel without comparing it, on several levels, with the works of John Steinbeck and John O’Hara. . . . Murkoff shares their unique literary style and wonderful sense of prose." —Roanoke Times

"Poetic. . . . Explore[s] the most basic questions of humanity: love and betrayal, life and death, hope and despair." —Rocky Mountain News

"Vividly rendered. . . . Striking prose. . . . Murkoff has a flair for sensory detail . . . tangibly capturing the engineer’s deep longing for his lost way of life. . . . [A] David Guterson-style tale of human connection and triumph over adversity." —Philadelphia City Paper

"Dazzling. . . . Lyrical. . . . The book has a lush, surround-sound grandeur to it . . . [and] a juicy climatic ending. . . . An impressive and satisfying literary debut . . . with a prose that recalls John Steinbeck . . . and John Dos Passos." —The Buffalo News

"Exceptional. . . . The novel is like the great river it talks about, with many twists and turns–sometimes calm and sometimes raging. Bruce Murkoff has written a tale full of excitement and anticipation." —The Huntsville Times

"Equal parts Guterson poetical epic, Steinbeckish Depression-social-canvas fiction, and Jim Thompson nihilist noir. . . . [Murkoff is] the most promising . . . first-time novelist of the year." —Seattle Weekly

"Bruce Murkoff. Remember that name. If his debut novel, Waterborne, is indicative, he should have a successful career ahead of him. . . . His writing not only sings, it carries a thousand melodies. . . . The journey through Murkoff’s prose shouldn’t be missed." —World-Herald (Omaha)