An Evening with Stephanie Soileau in Conversation with Barry Ancelet!

Stephanie Soileau will be at CHB Lafayette on July 21 at 6 p.m. to celebrate her latest release, Should the Waters Take Us, with a conversation with Barry Ancelet, live music, and a signing!

Stephanie and Barry will discuss Should the Waters Take Us, an epic debut novel that follows one family across four centuries, from France to Acadia to the bayous of Southern Louisiana.

This will be a Cajun celebration of an evening as Sam Broussard will join Barry in playing an acoustic set of the music featured in Stephanie’s novel!

Secure your seat and your copy of _Should the Waters Take Us _through Bon Temps Tix! Book tickets will be available until 11:59 p.m. on July 20. Our free general admission tickets will be available up to the event itself or until it’s sold out! Copies of the novel will be available at the event.

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Synopsis of Should the Waters Take Us:

In the shifting bayous of coastal Louisiana, on a rapidly disappearing spit of land, generations of Acadians have kept their heads above water any way they can. When an offshore rig explodes and unleashes a catastrophic spill, the people of Pelerin Parish face a reckoning that tests the bonds of family and the survival of their way of life.

As the toxic plume of oil advances across the Gulf, Boy Broussard, already living hand to mouth off another man’s land, finds himself raising a daughter he barely knows. His dying aunt, Rosa Terrebonne, tries to right the misdeeds of the past yet finds herself thwarted by her husband, Jacot, a retired landman for big oil who refuses to give up claim to the plot of ground where Boy makes his living. Meanwhile, the parish priest, Father Fabian, far from his home in the Niger Delta, lends his assistance to Boy’s all-but-motherless daughter, only to be met with suspicion and hostility from the insular community. When a powerful hurricane threatens to turn an already dire situation into a total cataclysm, this sharp-edged cast of characters collides in a thunderclap of resentment and violence. Throughout all this, Soileau unfolds a sweeping tapestry of loss, resilience, and the fragile miracle of hope.

Should the Waters Take Us reaches across four hundred years of history to illuminate the many epochs and peoples of this storied place. Soileau has crafted an emotionally explosive family saga, as well as a masterful literary crie de coeur about the ways in which moral compromise can eat away at the very fabric of the places we call home.