Wild Dark Tides

"A devastating novel of CLIMATE, COMPLICITY, AND SECRETS that will haunt you for weeks...I could not put it down."

"Berlanga writes the bayou the way the bayou deserves to be written - like a place ALIVE with grief and grace."

"ABSOLUTELY UNFORGETTABLE. Berlanga's prose carves itself into you, line by line."

"HEART-STOPPING...Exquisitely rendered, profoundly humane."

A town on the edge of the water. A body beneath the foundation. A storm gathering offshore.

Lieutenant Della Boone is the first child of Petit Caillou ever to leave for a service academy, and the last person the bayou wanted to send back. When the federal government orders the relocation of the dying Louisiana fishing village she was born in, the Coast Guard chooses her to oversee its final six weeks. Population one hundred and eighty-seven, scheduled to be zero by the end of the season. The cypress is already half-drowned. The cemetery has been moved twice. The Gulf is coming, and nothing is going to stop it.

Then her nephew opens a hatch beneath the first house slated for demolition, and finds a chest freezer that has not run in thirty years, and a body inside wearing a deputy's badge.

Della has known the woman who raised her - Mae Arnold, the matriarch of Petit Caillou - her entire life. She has known the priest who baptized her, the boy she once loved, the families on every porch on the single road into town. And in the days that follow, as a tropical storm tightens the demolition timeline and the truth begins to surface, she will learn that every person she loved has been keeping the same secret from her, and that the silence of a small place is not an accident but a covenant - one she was raised inside without ever being asked to sign.

A novel of devastating twists, breathtaking beauty, and the impossible weight of homecoming, Wild Dark Tide is about the silences we inherit, the places that disappear, and the price of finally speaking the names of the dead.