Same River Twice: A Novel

Summary

“It’s rare to encounter a book that’s both thrilling and thoughtful, but that is Wiley Cash’s specialty. Same River Twice is the kind of gripping read you stay up too late with. But ultimately it’s so much more, a perceptive and quite moving novel about family, fate, and how history isn’t an abstract idea, but the force that shapes the lives we live right now.”
—Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind

From award-winning New York Times bestselling author Wiley Cash comes a transcendent story based in the contemporary South, a pressure-cooker novel set in motion when human remains are unearthed on a former plantation.

Bennett Place was once a thriving North Carolina rice plantation, built on the backs of the enslaved. Now, its new owner plans to transform it into a historic landmark celebrating his family heritage. But when human remains are unearthed during construction, a complex chain of events is set in motion bringing together a cast of characters haunted by the region's legacy.

There's Jessica, the ambitious site manager who is wrestling with crippling college loan payments and an ethical dilemma as a result of the find.

Aaron, a successful writer, who returns to the land his ancestors worked, searching for the truth about his father's disappearance.

And Kevin, the district attorney, whose professional duties and private life collide as he investigates a mystery that hits dangerously close to home.

Aaron, Kevin, and Jessica must confront long-hidden secrets and the complex inheritance of the South—a place where the ghosts of the Confederacy still linger—as they grapple with their own complicated pasts.

Suspenseful, richly layered, and written with masterful prose, Same River Twice explores the fraught intersections of race and class with stunning acumen. It's a powerful, indelible story about who owns history, who has the right to tell it, and the price of digging up truths that some would prefer to forget. This is Wiley Cash’s most ambitious and accomplished novel yet.