Filius Poe, a dam engineer, is grieving the loss of his wife and son. Lew Beck, mean and brutish, is out to avenge his life of deprivation. Lena McCardell, who thought she had exactly what she wanted, is fleeing her husband, hoping for the chance of a fresh start and a brighter future for her son. From various directions and distances, these three lives converge on Boulder City and the Boulder Dam, the most ambitious engineering project of its day and a beacon of hope for an America crippled by the Great Depression. Waterborne is a panorama of human desire and enterprise, a novel about the power of love to engender hope, the forging of friendship and the tragedy of unfulfilled dreams. It marks the arrival of a major new American writer.