THE ATLAS OF LOW WATER

When Mara Venn returns to the coastal town she left behind, she expects to bury her mother, sort through the family’s papers, and leave again.

Instead, she finds an old atlas.

Hidden among her mother’s tide charts and weather records, the atlas reveals a forgotten waterway beneath the town—an abandoned channel that once carried floodwater safely toward the marsh. As Saltmere prepares for a new flood barrier, Mara begins to suspect that the official maps tell only part of the story.

The deeper she investigates, the more she uncovers about the town’s buried past: a vanished channel, a disputed piece of history, her mother’s unfinished work, and the disappearance of Mara’s father years earlier during a storm at sea.

With the next major flood approaching, Mara must determine whether the old channel can still work before the town makes a decision that cannot be undone.

But some maps are not made simply to show where things are.

Some maps reveal what people chose to forget.

The Atlas of Low Water is a quietly suspenseful coastal novella about family, memory, loss, community, and the fragile relationship between people and the water they cannot control.