num_pages: 320
description: German poet Anja Kampmanns award-winning debut novel is the dazzling heart-rending story of an oil rig worker whose closest friend goes missing plunging him into isolation and forcing him to confront his pastOne night aboard an oil drilling platform in the Atlantic Waclaw returns to his cabin to find that his bunkmate and companion Mtys has gone missing. A search of the rig confirms his fear that Mtys has fallen into the sea.Grief-stricken he embarks on an epic emotional and physical journey that takes him to Morocco to Budapest and Mtyss hometown in Hungary to Malta Italy and finally to the mining town of his childhood in Germany. Waclaws encounters along the way with other lost and yearning souls  Mtyss angry grieving half-sister; lonely rig workers on shore leave; a truck driver who watches the world change from his drivers 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.
language: English
title: High as the Waters Rise
publisher: Catapult