Overview

The floodwaters keep rising, the torrential rains continue, and suddenly your life and home are thrust onto flood stage. How do you react to the peril? Do you stay or flee? What do you choose to carry away, and what do you hope to leave behind? Ferocious rains pummel Thalburg Canyon and overfill the Baptista River that runs through a tight-knit rural community in Northern California. When flooding ensues, canyon residents are forced to make life-altering decisions, and their interconnected stories are acted out on center stage. A paralyzed woman, exhausted by her life, plans an opportune death in the flood. The local real estate agent is shocked to discover beauty in the canyon's demise. Couples drift together or apart over old affairs and insurance coverage mistakes. A man burdened by a toxic secret struggles for atonement as the flood encroaches upon his final opportunity for redemption. These and other stories portray a series of unique personal histories caught up in a universal human drama. REVIEWS ""Touching and poignant, Flood Stage is a fine novel that shouldn't be missed. "" --Midwest Book Review ""Kate Scannell brings to life the diverse characters in Flood Stage in a way that allowed me to inhabit their hearts and minds. ... I read the book in two evenings and now come back to it to savor its many insights. "" --Lance Reynolds ACCLAIM FOR THE AUTHOR'S MEMOIR, Death of the Good Doctor: Lessons from the Heart of the AIDS Epidemic ""This haunting memoir is an important addition to the canon of AIDS literature. Scannell writes beautifully and with an insight that escapes most physicians."" --Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country and Cutting for Stone ""Kate Scannell is the rare doctor who has been transformed by her patients. In this irresistible, informative, and enormously moving book, she tells us not only her own story, but theirs."" --Gloria Steinem "" ... an enormously moving, thoughtful and compassionate memoir. "" --Minneapolis Star-Tribune ACCLAIM FOR Immortal Wounds: A Doctor Nora Kelly Mystery ""Immortal Wounds is a compelling, richly textured mystery that draws us deeply into the cloistered world of the hospital. A murderer or two may be on the loose in Scannell's thriller, but the psychological struggles and ethical mysteries encountered daily by her doctors and nurses prove just as riveting. A must-read! "" --Jodi Halpern, MD, author of From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice

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9781732571440

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Reviews

"""Touching and poignant, Flood Stage is a fine novel that shouldn't be missed."" --Midwest Book Review ""Kate Scannell brings to life the diverse characters in Flood Stage in a way that allowed me to inhabit their hearts and minds. As a white male elder it may seem obvious that I can clearly relate to the tormented Bill Dunleavy for past misdeeds. It is much less apparent that I can understand and feel what it might be like to spend an adult lifetime wheel chair bound, as does Bill's childhood sweetheart Maddy Bertolli. Now I can. The setting is a small and remote northern California town under evacuation from a flood that will destroy its houses, farms and businesses. In twenty interconnected stories Kate takes us in clear and economical prose through the triumphs and disappointments, the loves and the heartbreaks, of the inhabitants' lives. She unpeels the misunderstandings that put relationships and marriages in peril, whether from the viewpoint of an adolescent youth or an Indian dentist. I began to understand what it might be like to be an African American woman in a largely white town enduring well-meaning but obtuse comments and questions. I read the book in two evenings and now come back to it to savor its many insights. Buy it and read it. It has enriched my life and I believe it will enrich yours."" --Lance Reynolds"

Touching and poignant, Flood Stage is a fine novel that shouldn't be missed. --Midwest Book Review Kate Scannell brings to life the diverse characters in Flood Stage in a way that allowed me to inhabit their hearts and minds. As a white male elder it may seem obvious that I can clearly relate to the tormented Bill Dunleavy for past misdeeds. It is much less apparent that I can understand and feel what it might be like to spend an adult lifetime wheel chair bound, as does Bill's childhood sweetheart Maddy Bertolli. Now I can. The setting is a small and remote northern California town under evacuation from a flood that will destroy its houses, farms and businesses. In twenty interconnected stories Kate takes us in clear and economical prose through the triumphs and disappointments, the loves and the heartbreaks, of the inhabitants' lives. She unpeels the misunderstandings that put relationships and marriages in peril, whether from the viewpoint of an adolescent youth or an Indian dentist. I began to understand what it might be like to be an African American woman in a largely white town enduring well-meaning but obtuse comments and questions. I read the book in two evenings and now come back to it to savor its many insights. Buy it and read it. It has enriched my life and I believe it will enrich yours. --Lance Reynolds

Author Information

KATE SCANNELL is a physician and author who has written extensively in lay and professional media about healthcare and medical practice. She is the author of the memoir Death of the Good Doctor: Lessons from the Heart of the AIDS Epidemic, and the novel Flood Stage. Her first Doctor Nora Kelly mystery, Immortal Wounds, was published in 2018. The second-in-series, Lethal Control, was published in 2021, and the third, Double Fault, followed in 2024. She practiced medicine in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she currently lives.

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