The Hundred Waters
By Lauren Acampora
Grove Press, August 29, 2022
Formerly a model and photographer trying to make it in New York, Louisa Rader is back in her affluent hometown of Nearwater, Connecticut, where she’s married to a successful older architect, raising a preteen daughter, and trying to vitalize the provincial local art center. As the years pass, she’s grown restless in her safe and comfortable routine, haunted by the flash of the life she used to live. When intense and intriguing young artist-environmentalist Gabriel arrives in town with his aristo-cratic family, his impact on the Raders has hothouse effects. As Gabriel pushes to realize his artistic vision for the world, he pulls both Louisa and her daughter Sylvie under his spell, with consequences that disrupt the Raders’ world forever.
A strange, sexy, and sinister novel of art and attraction, in The Hundred Waters Acampora gives us an incisive, page-turning story of ambition, despair, desire, and the price of fulfillment and freedom at all costs.
Selected Praise
"Acampora’s prose has a seductive, pearlescent allure.”
— TIME Magazine
"Take The Talented Mr. Ripley, cross it with Suspiria, add a dash of La La Land and mix it all at midnight and this arty psychological stalker novel is what might result.”
— New York Times Book Review
"A hypnotic tale of codependence that skewers our fascination with gossip and fame.”
— O Magazine, “The Best Books by Women of Summer 2019”
About the Author
Lauren Acampora is the author of The Wonder Garden, winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a finalist for the New England Book Award; and The Paper Wasp, longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. She is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has appeared Paris Review, Guernica, The New York Times Book Review, and LitHub, among other places. She lives in Westchester County, New York with her husband, artist Thomas Doyle, and their daughter.