The Art of Drowning Hardcover – March 20, 2026

Two Catherines. Two crashes. Generational patterns of survival.New York society has always had a use for women like Catherine Worthington. At twenty-four, she knows exactly what that use is — and has spent her whole life being useful.When her cousin Madison arrives from California in the spring of 2008, Catherine does what her bloodline demands. Madison doesn't just disrupt Catherine's carefully managed world — she exposes it. The addiction nobody mentions. The loyalty that looks, from certain angles, indistinguishable from cowardice. The rot underneath the performance, in Catherine's world and in herself.In the summer of 1929, another Catherine makes a choice that cannot be unmade. She tells herself it's sacrifice. She tells herself it's love. Both things are true, and neither one saves her.What follows is a season of exposure — a marriage rotting from the inside, reputations destroyed by their owners' own hands, and a society exquisitely designed to punish the reckless while rewarding those who know how to look away.Catherine knows how to look away. She has always known. What it cost her is the only honest thing she ever wrote down.The Art of Drowning is a novel of manners for an era that forgot what manners were hiding. Read more