HEART LIKE WATER is a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

The most personal, most comprehensive and most acclaimed book to come out of Hurricane Katrina.

"In the growing constellation of Hurricane Katrina books, Josh Clark's masterful tale shines brightest. The Apocalypse destroyed a city and ripped to shreds lives, but the legibility of its profound inner impact had to wait for this book, which is a love story. Clark's book is our 'Love in a Time of Cholera,' but, even more than Marquez' novel, it is immediate and wrenching and true, while its rhythms, like Marquez', are nothing short of majestic. Josh Clark has written the great non-fiction New Orleans novel, a book that's here to stay."

—Andrei Codrescu

"Joshua Clark's Heart Like Water is a beautifully written, sometimes raucous, often angry, always gripping memoir of his days in New Orleans during and after Katrina, Rita and the tragic aftermath of these disasters. Clark was one of the few who stayed in New Orleans for the duration. His first-person account begins in the French Quarter, where he and girlfriend hunker down to weather the storm, and evolves into a lyrical and damning witnessing of a city and a populace ravaged and abandoned. He joins the small army of those who step up to the plate and help out wherever they can. He travels through the devastated Lower Ninth Ward, and the Bywater, is one of the first to drive to Lafitte, La., to Baton Rouge, and to Magnolia, in Plaquemines Parish, tape recorder in hand, and let folks talk for themselves. He watches CNN cameras, the FEMA men and Black Hawks, the NYPD takes the measure of the alleys and attics and looted shops, the bars and hotels filled with refugees, dips himself in the warm waters of the mighty Mississippi as the winds of Rita gather fury. In the end he vows to 'continue to drive, to document these places, walk their deserts, for as many years as it takes, to see exactly what will grow from this new American landscape, to record it, and help it.' (Once power came back, Clark sets up a fund to help New Orleans area writers affected by the storm, Katrina Arts Relief and Emergency Support or KARES; a portion of his royalties will go to that fund.)"

—Jane Ciabattari, National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors

"Heart Like Water is intoxicating—and that has nothing to do with the liquor consumed in the aftermath of this city, town, and coast-eating event. Heart Like Water intoxicates because of its truth, its visceral reality. I could not but sip slowly from its pages; walking with Josh through the Quarter; aching in Lakeview; crying on the bridge looking down at the 9th Ward; venturing inside homes and lives shredded by this cataclysmic storm.

He gives us water, mud, and things we would rather had always stayed in the dark. He hands us soaked family pictures, unredeemable. He tears out our hearts with pieces of homes, of furniture, of jobs, of lives tangled in the wreckage of the pain of this unnecessary horror.
And yet he shows us, step by step, street by street, town by town, that we go on, despite life-eviscerating winds, home-gagging water, hollow promises made in our Jackson Square.

In shared meals, shared produce, rare frosted drinks, in a cell phone and a laptop charged here or there by the famous ‘kindness of strangers,’ he gives us the great truth, that we go on, we can go on. Indeed, we must go on."

—Remy Benoit

“Sprawling, rambunctious, and finally very moving.. a valuable, kaleidoscopic record of a time when reality got turned inside out in America’s most soulful city.” 

—Tom Piazza, author of Why New Orleans Matters

“Part combat memoir, part story of one man’s heart breaking for a city.. Joshua Clark steps into literary history, a true New Orleans character.”

–Susan Larson, Book Editor of The Times Picayune

"Joshua Clark has written a poignant, evocative book about the city he loves. Heart Like Water has the paradoxical ability to both uplift and haunt."

—Douglas Brinkley

Read more about the book on Simon & Schuster's site HERE.

Heart Like Water is available from your favorite bookseller or AMAZON.

A portion of proceeds will benefit KARES, which raises money to support the rebirth of New Orleans' literary community.

Watch YouTube episodes which include footage
of Clark's interviews during Hurricane
Katrina's immediate aftermath...