When He Was Still Young

Hes a raconteur of rivers and roads, a man who has packed a Range Rover with wine and flown across oceans to chase trout and solitude. But home is where the unglamorous reckonings happen: a hospital room, a screened-in porch, a lover who announces shes leaving. Faced with betrayal, sudden illness in a friend, and the unraveling of rituals that once anchored him, Skip must decide what to fight for—and what to let go.

From the ragged edges of Cool Spring Farm to the grand salons of Victoria and the storm-torn paths of the English Lake District, this is a map of a life in fragments: boyhood games with Jingles, a teenage wreck that haunted him, boyhood parades and small-town heroes, and the quiet terror of being left behind. Racing across continents and into memory, Skip searches for a final reconciliation: with love, with grief, and with the places that made him.

Taut and tender, MUDDY WATER is a portrait of a man who must choose whether to cling to the life he remembers or to step, at last, into what remains.