Strengthening community through the shared experience of a book.
A good book is an immersive experience, an opportunity for the reader to get lost in imagination and explore a new world. A great book does that and more — it brings a community together to discuss, debate, and share in its wonder.
All the Water in the World, by Whiting Award winner Eiren Caffall, is a great book — and even better than that, it is the WestportREADS 2026 book selection.
The Westport Library is thrilled to announce this year’s selection and even more excited to welcome Caffall to the Trefz Forum on Thursday, February 19, for a conversation on herbook, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York’s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future and a masterful story of a family fighting to not be drowned by a changing world.
“Eiren Caffall created a fully imaginable world within a horrific new future that wasn’t all doom and gloom within a flooded city," said Jennifer Keller, one of the members of the WestportREADS 2026 selection committee. "All the Water In the World explores family and climate change in a rich coming-of-age story that we can all relate to in some way.”
Limited copies of the book are available for borrowing now, with many more copies arriving December 10. All the Water in the World will also be available as a digital copy (e-book) and as an audiobook at that time.
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 toward 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.
Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician. In addition to All the Water in the World, which was selected as a Barnes and Nobel Discover Book, she published an award-winning memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary. Her essays on loss and nature, oceans, and extinction have appeared in Orion, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus.
Caffall received a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2023 for The Mourner’s Bestiary; a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship in environmental journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2016; and in 2017 a Frontline: Environmental Reportage residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where she studied with Naomi Klein. She has also been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook, The Millay Colony, and The RagdaleFoundation, and was waitlisted for a MacDowell Colony residency.
She has guest lectured at UCLA, University of Chicago, and other universities across the U.S., taught creative writing for The Chicago Humanities Festival, taught a memoir body and place week-long masterclass and Memoir in a Year for Story Studio in Chicago, led creative nonfiction workshops Maine Writers and Publishers, and mentored graduate students at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has performed her writing live at Joe’s Pub and other venues and been interviewed and appeared on podcasts, including Chris Hedge’s podcast, and many local NPR stations.
With her collaborator, the filmmaker Scott K. Foley, she adapted her essay “Becoming Ocean: when you and the world are drowning” into the award-winning short film Becoming Ocean, which screened at film festivals across the United States and in Amsterdam and Morocco. She has released three records of original songs with her band, including Slipping the Holdfast, Civil Twilight, and Prairie Music, and was awarded a 3Arts Make a Wave grant in music in 2021.
Caffall lives in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago with her family and three cats.
Created in 2002, WestportREADS is a way for the Westport community to bond over a book and is designed to deepen our community’s engagement in literature.
Throughout January and February, there will be events and programs centered on All the Water in the World, book discussions, celebrations, and much more. It is a chance not only to read a great book but to engage with the community, meet new people, and celebrate our shared love of reading.
WestportREADS is funded by the estate of Jerry A. Tishman.
Kirkus Starred — “Gripping, beautifully descriptive, and likely to stay with you.”
Booklist Starred — “Caffall channels her considerable ecological expertise and wrenching personal experiences into her commanding, heart-pounding, and haunting first novel, which follows her ravishing memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary.”
“Gripping…tense, delightful and rich with resonance.” ― Scientific American
“When the world collapses, will our love for each other? Each sentence is a treasure. Read this and be changed.” — Rene Denfeld, best-selling author of The Child Finder and Sleeping Giants
"Caffall was inspired to write her story by curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect collections from war." — New Scientist
"A gorgeously written novel that tackles not just the climate condition, but the human one. Narrated by Nonie, a young member of a family in the near future, All the Water in the World tells the story of their escape from their dwelling, which just happens to be the top of the Museum of Natural History (called Amen) until after a fierce super storm makes it inhabitable, forcing them to flee to what they desperately hope is going to be safety. This is one brilliant and engrossing book—and I’ll say my heartfelt 'Amen' to that." — Caroline Leavitt, New York Times best-selling author of Pictures of You and Days of Wonder
"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, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
"I am gripped by Eiren Caffall's river-going adventure tale. It moves through darkness like the beam of a flashlight: urgent, questing, incandescent." — Josephine Ferorelli, co-author of The Conceivable Future
"All the Water in the World has everything: stunning prose, wonderful characters, powerful themes, and a plot that moves like a freight train... Nonie, the novel's narrator and heart, spins a tale that will make you think, bring you to tears, keep you on the edge of your seat, and leave you buzzing. Read this book immediately." — Abby Geni, author of The Lightkeepers and The Body Farm
"With its beautiful sentences and a propulsive plot, All the Water in the World, asks us how we continue to love both a world in environmental crisis and each other through that crisis. This is an essential novel for our times. Nonie, the young, neuro-divergent, main character will whisper in my ears for a very long time and that is the most powerful work a book can do." — Nayomi Munaweera, award-winning author of Island of a Thousand Mirrors and What Lies Between Us
"Eiren Caffall’s exquisite novel of climate disaster and human tenderness has you trembling, turning pages faster and faster, wanting more, even as you try to slow down and savor writing so precisely lovely it alone breaks your heart." — Bee Ridgway, author of The River of No Return
All The Water In The World: A Reader's Guide
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