The Hundred-Year Flood: A Novel
Matthew Salesses"What carries us through the novel is Salesses’ gift for language: here is a meditative, poetic, modern fable crafted in haunting bursts of impressionistic prose." Kirkus Reviews
This beautiful and dreamlike debut follows twenty-two-year-old Tee as he escapes to Prague in the wake of his uncle's suicide and the aftermath of 9/11. Tee tries to convince himself that living in a new place will mean a new identity and a chance to shed the parallels between him and his adopted father.
His life intertwines with Pavel Picasso, a painter famous for revolution; Katka, his equally alluring wife; and Picasso's partner - a giant of a man with an American name. In the shadow of a looming flood that comes every one hundred years, Tee contemplates his own place in life as both mixed and adopted and as an American in a strange land full of heroes, myths, and ghosts.
“Tee is in Prague. He is running away from memory. He is running toward myth. He is searching. In Prague, Tee meets an artist and the artist’s wife. Before long, the three are drawn into a fateful series of events as Prague is laid bare by a flood that only comes every hundred years. This beautiful debut novel by Matthew Salesses is much like that flood—epic and devastating and full of natural majesty.” - Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist