Swift River

Boston needs water. The engineers know where to find it. But four towns stand in their way …

“I am entirely a creature of my life’s sad events, committed to patience now, to endurance if nothing else. I am a part of my surroundings and they are all contained in me. Girl expecting the water.” — Polly McPhee, Greenwich, Massachusetts, 1934

Swift River is the story of Polly McPhee, a native of Greenwich, a small central Massachusetts town condemned with three others in 1927 to create a permanent supply of clean water for the people of Boston. One of the most successful and cost-effective civil engineering projects in history, the Quabbin Reservoir secured fresh water for millions by drowning the Swift River Valley, once home to the Nipmuc and then to generations of farmers, merchants, artisans, and mill workers.

As the start of this intimate yet far-reaching novel, Polly is a 12 year old girl who sees the water project as an especially unfair aspect of an adult world that rarely makes sense to her anyway. As she matures, discovering new joys and suffering a series of profound personal losses, Polly comes to understand that ultimately all of our pasts and memories must be drowned and erased from sight, as thoroughly as Greenwich will be. Over time the project assumes an ever more complex and significant role in Polly's life and universe, ultimately becoming a dangerous but powerful ally in her path to survival and redemption.

I started writing stories around age eight. At Harvard I studied writing with Ann Beattie, Monroe Engel, and Grace Mojtabai. My story collection THE LIGHT OF HOME was published by Atheneum in 1992, and my novels TREE OF HEAVEN and THE SOLDIER by Soho in 1995 and 1996. My writing career was interrupted in the late 1990s. The publication of my novel SWIFT RIVER in 2014, my own edition of TREE OF HEAVEN in 2015, and NATIVE CHILD in 2016 represents my renewed effort to write and be read. I have lived in Cambridge, Mass for since 1976. Learn more about my books at http: //rcbinstock.com.