Jaime Almonte thought he was leaving his past behind.
After the death of the grandmother who raised him, he abandons New York City for a crumbling adobe house beside the Rio Grande, carrying little more than a photograph, a box of memories, and a lifetime of stories.
But the river remembers.
Beneath the waters live ancient beings sustained by memory and belief - a weeping woman in the shallows, small gods in every irrigation ditch, a plumed serpent dreaming the weather in the deep green water near the gorge. Above them all, the thunderbird has always held the balance between storm and drought. Now a dying thunderbird has left behind a single spark of life, and something far older and far hungrier has begun to awaken in the deep places where forgotten stories gather.
As storms roll across the desert and legends walk the riverbanks once more, Jaime discovers that the old stories live only as long as someone carries them - and that the carrying has fallen to him.
He came to the river to bury his grandmother's world. The river has other plans.
The River Remembers is a novel of the American Southwest and the borderland between memory and myth, where inheritance is not a house or a box of photographs but a debt owed to the water.
