Get your feet wet with highlights from Seattle Public Library and King County Library’s 2026 Book Bingo “Water” category below, or dive straight into the deep end with the full curated list here.
Fiction:
All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall is part post-apocalyptic survival story, part adventure travelogue, and part meditation on what we save at the end of world as we knew it. When a superstorm breaches what’s left of NYC’s flood walls, the small group of researchers and their families who have been living atop and protecting the American Museum of Natural History must flee the city by boat, taking with them only their most treasured item: a book of all the lost collections.
Relocating to her husband’s home-town in Texas, where water isn’t safe to drink and boil notices are routine, an intrepid former radio news director discovers dirty truths in the even dirtier water that put her job and family at risk in Phyllis Dioxon’s thriller Something in the Water.
A moving novel about the intense bonds of childhood friendship and the rip tides of grief, Under Water by Tara Menon travels between a young woman’s past – days spent swimming with manatees and exploring the ocean with her best friend before the devastating 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand; and her present – the imminent landfall of Hurricane Sandy in NYC.
Edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan, and Troy L. Wiggins (each award-winning writers, editors, and poets themselves) Trouble the Waters is a stunning collection of stories and poems celebrating the elemental power of water.
Originally published in 1994 and recently reissued, Watershed by Percival Everett (author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning novel James) is a layered tale of racism, activism, corruption, and murder centered around Native American water rights.
Non-Fiction
Novelist and science writer James Bradley looks at ocean ecosystems to explore the interconnectedness of all life on our planet in Deep Water: The World in the Ocean, braiding together natural studies, climate science, and trivia to offer “vital new ways of understanding not just humanity’s relationship with the planet, but our past – and perhaps most importantly, our future” (publisher).
The Three Ages of Water by Peter Gleick takes a long view of the history of water and how it has shaped humanity’s evolution and development, from early civilizations, to the social and scientific revolutions of the modern era, to our current reality fraught with depletion and pollution of this once abundant resource.
Amy-Jane Beer takes a more personal approach to our relationship with water in The Flow: Rivers, Water, and Wildness. Haunted by the loss of her best friend during a kayaking trip in 2012, Beer returns to the river that claimed her friend and explores, through a meandering travelogue across Britain’s waterways, how vital and sustaining our connection to the natural world is.
In his whimsical-yet-practical book, Ultrawild, New Zealand designer and illustrator Steve Mushin invites readers of all ages to dream and radically re-imagine, or rather re-wild, our cities and urban spaces through audacious invention and design, highlighting the Indigenous peoples and practices of New Zealand that inform his designs along the way.
Part memoir, part history, The Water Remembers by Amy Bowers Cordalis (honored as a UN Champion of the World Laureate) details her family’s legacy as leaders in the Yurok Tribe’s struggle for land, water, and fishing rights in Northern California, along with her more recent efforts to hold the corporate interests responsible for a devastating fish kill accountable and to lead the largest river restoration project in history.
For more ideas for books to meet your Summer Book Bingo challenge, follow our Shelf Talk BookBingoNW2026 series or check the hashtag #BookBingoNW2026 on social media. Book Bingo is presented in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures and the King County Library System.
~Posted by V.
