Wading Home

When Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans, chef and widower Simon Fortier knows how he plans to face the storm - riding it out inside his long-time home in the city's Treme district, just as he has done in so many storms before. But when the waters rise and the city is torn apart by the storm's fury, Simon disappears. His son, Julian, a celebrated jazz trumpeter, rushes home to a New Orleans he left years before to search for a father with whom he'd been on difficult terms since the death of his mother. As Julian crisscrosses the city, searching for some word of his father and hoping that Simon has been able to escape his flooded home, he reconnects with Matthew Parmenter - his father's erstwhile business partner and one of the most successful restaurateurs in New Orleans - and with Velmyra Hartley, the woman he left behind when he moved to New York. Julian's search for Simon deepens, and he finds himself drawn further into the troubled history of Silver Creek, the small Louisiana town where his father grew up, and closer once again to Velmyra. As he tries to come to grips with his father's likely fate and struggles to regain his trumpet chops, Julian slowly gains a deeper, richer understanding of the father and the city he loved so much, while unraveling the mysteries of Silver Creek.


Genre: Literary Fiction