Watershed

by Percival Everett

A classic of politics, murder, and espionage

“Watershed has all the makings of a social thriller…In this novel about water and the struggle for a life free of injustice, the mix doesn’t just work, it flows.” — Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio

“It’s hard . . . to imagine a novelist today with fresher eyes than Percival Everett.”―Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune

On a windswept landscape somewhere north of Denver, Robert Hawks, a feisty and dangerously curious hydrologist, finds himself enmeshed in a fight over Native American treaty rights. What begins for Robert as a peaceful fishing interlude ends in murder and the disclosure of government secrets. Everett mines history for this one, focusing on the relationship between Native American activists and Black Panther groups who bonded over their shared enemies in the 1960s Civil Rights movement.

Watershed is an excellent example of Percival Everett’s famed bitingly political narrative style.

Paperback | 208 pages | Beacon Press | 2024

Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children