Mary Annaïse Heglar is an extraordinary writer who works at the intersections of climate change, climate grief, and climate justice. Her latest book, Troubled Waters, which releases next month, weaves an unforgettable, distinctly Southern story of the enduring power of family, Black resistance, and the rising climate crisis.

In this intimate portrait of two generations, a granddaughter and a grandmother come to terms with what it means to be family, Black women, and alive in a world on fire.

The world is burning—and Corrine will do anything to put out the flames. After her brother died aboard an oil boat on the Mississippi River in 2013, Corrine awakened to the realities of climate change and its perpetrators. Now, a year later, she finds herself trapped in a lonely cycle of mourning both her brother and the very planet she stands on. She’s convinced that in order to save her future, she has to make sure that her brother’s life meant something. But in the act of honoring her brother’s spirit, she resurrects family ghosts she knows little about—ghosts her grandmother Cora knows intimately.

The world is burning—but it always has been. Cora’s ghosts have followed her from her days as a child integrating schools in 1950s Nashville to her new life as a mother, grandmother, and teacher in Mississippi. As a child of the civil rights movement, she’s done her best to keep those specters away from her granddaughter. She faced those demons, she reasons to herself, so that Corinne would never know they existed.