Surviving an Oil Spill in Louisiana, and More New Fiction for July

Should the Waters Take Us

Stephanie Soileau (Doubleday, 336 pp., $30, July 2026)

Stephanie Soileau’s debut novel, Should the Waters Take Us, begins and ends in the same place: a house in the bayous of southern Louisiana, on the eve of a devastating storm. At the start of the book, it is 1893, and what seems to be the Chenière Caminada hurricane is about to hit, taking with it entire communities. In 2010, the relatives of the family whose home miraculously survived that onslaught prepare to face another one.

Should the Waters Take Us is an epic about environmental exploitation and the calamities it wreaks. Most of the story takes place in 2010 in the fictional Louisiana community of Pelerin Parish. Many residents are proudly Cajun, “the French-speaking descendants of the rollicking, complacent Acadians expelled from New France [in what is now Nova Scotia] more than a century before.”

Soileau’s cast of protagonists wrestles with the fallout of an oil rig explosion that is almost certainly a reference to the Deepwater Horizon spill, the worst such disaster in U.S. history. “God sent up a cloud of ash and a deluge of oil from the belly of the earth,” she writes. Soileau, who is herself Cajun, also includes historical vignettes that add an ancestral perspective to the main plot, such as the opening chapter about the 1893 storm.

The 2010 blast doesn’t only harm the natural environment—it also endangers people’s livelihoods. In many ways, southern Louisiana is trapped by its plentiful natural resources: “The blessing of oil, the curse of oil. Wealth that saves and wealth that destroys,” Soileau writes. The residents of Pelerin Parish are both economically dependent on the oil industry and resentful of it, powerless in the face of unabashed corporate greed. Soileau mentions ExxonMobil by name several times throughout the book.

After the explosion, a single mother who worked on the rig to support her daughter is suddenly traumatized and out of work, coaxed into signing a waiver that prevents her from suing her employer for damages. (“[J]ust the kind of shenanigans the oil industry would pull,” Soileau writes.) An oyster farmer can no longer farm or sell his contaminated wares. And some residents in the community—a place of “overwhelming whiteness”—respond to an influx of Black and Latino cleanup workers from elsewhere in the state with racism.

Just as Pelerin Parish begins to find its footing again, a dangerous hurricane barrels toward the Louisiana coastline. The trauma of Hurricane Katrina is still fresh as Soileau’s characters jockey with nature’s furor once more.

Should the Waters Take Us alternately reads as both provincial and global. For most characters, even a trip to New Orleans is a cosmopolitan undertaking. But Soileau takes care to emphasize that locals’ travails do not occur in a vacuum, especially when an economy runs on oil.

In addition to scenes in Canada and France—the text is peppered with French phrases—Soileau briefly takes characters to Nigeria. The Catholic priest in Pelerin Parish is Nigerian and grew up near an oil rig, yet disasters in the country rarely made headlines. The priest reflects on the differences between his two homes: “Every year in the Niger Delta, an Exxon Valdez. Every year for forty years. The Niger Delta? No one is watching. The United States isn’t Nigeria. Everyone is watching.”

Oil spills are—bluntly—gross, but Soileau’s prose about them is gorgeous and evocative. “Opalescent rainbows stripe the creek,” she writes in one instance; in another, “[s]tinking riches rain down on their heads.” There might be some rhetorical logic to that mismatch. As one of Soileau’s characters points out, the names of oil rigs are often deeply ironic. “Brazen Light, Brightwater Field, something like that, too pretty for the purpose,” she writes.—Allison Meakem

Hustle, Baby: A Novel

Priya Guns (Doubleday, 304 pp., $30, July 2026)

“As far back as I remember, I was a hustler,” narrates the protagonist of Priya Guns’s new novel. “Hustling was in my blood because my cells formed in times of shelling, and my mother had to run so we didn’t die that day.”

The American Dream—and by extension, the immigrant dream—has always been predicated on the hustle. In Hustle, Baby, Guns amplifies that reality. Her novel has the spirit of Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s classic 1980s salesman drama, where a set of hucksters resort to unsavory methods in their quest for the good life (or a Cadillac, at least). This time, however, the main cast is a family of refugees who fled the Sri Lankan civil war and are just trying to get by in Toronto. They’re just as foul-mouthed as Mamet’s wheeler-dealers, but the stakes are higher.

The premise of Hustle, Baby is straightforward. It’s October 2000, and the family has until 9 a.m. on Dec. 15 to pay the landlord back rent or face eviction. Each of them has their own schemes for a quick buck as the clock ticks down: Dilo, the protagonist, upcharges her classmates for snacks and canned coffees; her mother puts her faith in God (and helps the family steal essentials from the local Walmart stand-in); and her aunt, a straight-talking former Tamil Tiger resistance fighter, tries to get in on a local scam. All three fall victim to a con man, who promises endless returns on investments via an opaque day-trading scheme.

Guns erupted on the literary scene with her 2023 debut novel, Your Driver Is Waiting, a gender-swapped take on the classic film Taxi Driver. Hustle, Baby further develops the feverish and unsentimental voice of that book. If many immigrant novels evoke a sense of homeland longing, Guns quickly discards this notion. “[D]on’t stretch this into some pitiful story,” the mother thinks. “I come from paradise, that’s true. But it was a place with venomous snakes, land mines, and bullets flying. There wasn’t a single family who didn’t know a person who died from a snake bite or two … who didn’t know a person who’d been killed.”

Guns also has a feel for American life at the turn of the millennium: There’s the pull of the megachurch, a toddler whose favorite programming is infomercials, a woman who drives by in a pink Caddy with veneers like “Chiclets” after joining a multilevel marketing scheme. Not to mention the yearning and danger and straight-up farce of the early chatroom-infested internet. Admittedly, little in this book is subtle. As Dilo narrates early on, “We ran straight from bombs to carcinogens and consumerism.” But as the action hammers on, reaching its (perhaps gratuitously) dark climax, it’s hard not to appreciate Guns’s swagger, her relentless interrogation of the tragicomic realities of the modern grind.—Chloe Hadavas

July Releases, In Brief

The highly anticipated sequel to Scottish author Irvine Welsh’s 1993 cult-classic Trainspotting, Men in Love, reaches the U.S. market. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest noir, The Intrigue, follows a con man’s antics in 1940s Mexico. A summer retreat at a British manor goes awry in Imogen Crimp’s modern gothic, Give Me Everything You’ve Got. The late French New Wave filmmaker Éric Rohmer’s first novel, Élisabeth, is translated into English by Aaron Kerner. Bora Lee Reed’s debut novel, Song for Another Home, tells of a family caught in the Korean War.

Jan Carson’s Few and Far Between presents an alternate (and alternately haunting) history of Northern Ireland. A Russian spy ring infiltrates Washington in Traitors, Robert B. McCaw’s old-school thriller. Tamil writer Jeyamohan’s White Elephant, translated by Priyamvada Ramkumar, offers a post-colonial spin on Heart of Darkness. In Valeria Luiselli’s Beginning Middle End, a mother-daughter duo parse histories big and small on a trip to Sicily. And Venezuelan author María Elena Morán makes her English-language debut with The Winds of Maracaibo, translated by Madeline Jones.—CH