Author Talk: Eiren Caffall's "All the Water in the World"

Join Tomorrow Bookstore for an author conversation with Eiren Caffall on her new novel, "All the Water in the World" with moderator Nathan Shuherk (@schizophrenicreads) . Caffall is a critically acclaimed author who also released her memoir, "The Mourner's Bestiary" in 2024. Both books will be available for purchase at the event and to pre-order with a ticket.

About All the Water in the World:

In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York's Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city's flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved.

Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story--with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most - love and work, community and knowledge - will survive.

When the world collapses, will our love for each other? Eiren Caffall answers the hard questions in this luminous novel. The Weight of All the Water in the World is a masterful story of a family fighting to not be drowned by a changing world. Each sentence is a treasure. Read this and be changed.

—Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Child Finder and Sleeping Giants

Along with its gorgeous language, its deeply human characters, its stay up all night ’cause you have to know what happens storytelling, [All the Water in the World] does the goddamn impossible. It makes the climate crisis real. Devastatingly, terrifyingly, gloriously real. Eiren Caffall is a masterfulful storyteller.

—Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life.

About Eiren Caffall :

EIREN CAFFALL is a writer and musician. Her work on loss, oceans, and extinction has appeared in Orion, Writer’s Digest, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, and the anthology Elementals: Volume IV. Fire, (The Center for Humans and Nature, 2024). She received a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship, and residencies at the Banff Centre, Millay Colony, Hedgebrook, and Ragdale. Her books include her memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary (Row House Publishing, 2024) and her novel All the Water in the World (St. Martin’s Press, 2025).

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Tomorrow Bookstore, 882 Massachusetts Avenue, Indianapolis, United States