“The Watersmith is a propulsive and lyrical novel with a palpable sense of place and music in every sentence. This book grabs you from the opening and never lets go.”

—Silas House

Author of Southernmost & Winner of the 2023 Southern Book Prize

“All the best books are about three things: love, memory, and desire. The Watersmith checks all the boxes, and more… Hard to believe it’s a first novel.”

—Daniel Wallace

Author of Big Fish & Winner of the 2019 Harper Lee Award

“An unflinching and highly engaging look at family and legacy and ways we cope with great pain; Wyatt’s lively prose and vivid characters know how to pull a reader in.”

—Aimee Bender

New York Times bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“The Watersmith is a haymaker to the heart and a warm bourbon burn to the soul. The prose steams off the page and hangs in the air like the angel’s share. I simply loved it.”

—Driver Williams

Songwriter & lead guitarist for Grammy award-winning country artist, Eric Church

“The Watersmith blends the hallmarks of great storytelling—emotion, lyricism, and good old-fashioned hurt—into a winding and weaving tale of family, the search for truth, and the lengths we go to salvage what we have. Wyatt has the sensibility to dive into both our deepest fears and our greatest loves.”

—Michael Farris Smith

Author of Lay Your Armor Down & Desperation Road

“The Watersmith is a most elemental novel... It explores what is basic to our existence: life and death, guilt and forgiveness, and, finally, hard-won acceptance of loss, and so Wyatt’s amazingly original and innovative use of the elements of fire and water are dead-on perfect. You will find yourself immersed in the current of this beautifully well-wrought debut.”

—Marlin Barton

Author of Children of Dust ‍ & Pasture Art

“With The Watersmith, Wyatt reshapes the dark terrain of the Southern Gothic into something uniquely his own. This is not merely a promising debut, it's the arrival of a fully realized literary voice. A stunning work of imagination, this novel is extraordinary.”

—Andrew Siegrist

Author of We Imagined It Was Rain

“Darkly gorgeous, richly atmospheric, and steeped in the tradition of the great Southern Gothic novels, The Watersmith is a spectacular debut from a singular literary voice. In rich, lyrical prose cut with dark humor, Wyatt creates a world that is wholly his own, vividly real and yet stunningly unique. The Smoky Mountain landscape lives and breathes. The Calloway family will break your heart. The Watersmith is a deeply moving exploration of family, legacy, and loss...and the lengths we'll go to keep love alive.”

—Lindsey Lee Johnson

Author of The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

“This transportive and lyrical novel gripped me from its first line to its last. The Watersmith is as surprising as it is propulsive, as heartbreaking as it redemptive, and as inimitable as it is timeless. I will be thinking about this novel for a long time.”

—Amy Meyerson

Internationally bestselling author of The Water Lies

“This damn book broke my heart…in the best way possible. Like some sort of midnight meeting between William Faulkner and Tom Robbins, The Watersmith reveals an American South that is by turns haunting, humorous, sinister, and intoxicating. With each improbable turn in the story, I marveled at Wyatt’s ability to create a protagonist who feels so familiar and sympathetic, even as his choices take him farther afield from reality. I guarantee you’ve never read a book like this!”

—JJ Strong

Author of Us Kids Know

“In Jack Calloway, Wyatt gifts us a captivating Southern raconteur, alive to the nature, peoples, and spirits of the Tennessee Valley watershed. This world is so richly observed, and the prose so richly textured, it really is Wyatt’s own—a wholly original reading experience. I found myself lingering on the last page, in the way a reader does with all great novels, deeply moved by what I had read. The Watersmith is a tale of love and memory; it is fable, and yarn, and meditation.”

—Andrew De Silva

Winner of Bayou Magazine’s James Knudsen Prize for Fiction

“In his compelling debut novel, Wyatt ventures into the timeless landscape of the American South, where past and present are distilled into a fragrance as potent as moonshine and as evocative as a whiff of honeysuckle.”

—Eric Rawson

Author of Banana Republic

“The Watersmith has everything we want in a story: love and loss, grief and release, suspense, endurance, humor, characters you can almost touch, compelling narrative voices (I can still hear them in my head), a sense that all can be wrong and that hope yet remains. This is an exceptional debut novel. I’m a richer human after reading Wyatt’s work.”

—Dr. Aaron J. Housholder

Professor of English at Taylor University & Fiction Editor of Relief

“Shocking, strange, and deeply tender, The Watersmith pulls off something remarkable: it takes an almost impossible premise and makes it utterly human. The result is a delightfully unsettling story of guilt, grief, and love that’s hard to shake.”

—Scott Lambridis

Author of St. Ulphia's Dead

“The Watersmith announces the arrival of a genuinely inventive literary voice. Wyatt understands the unique way that personal and family tales compact into shared history in a place like middle Tennessee, and he has built a novel from that fertile ground. At its center is a protagonist of real grit and hard-won wisdom, a man determined to see things through. This is a debut of uncommon ambition and feeling. A talent worth watching.”

—Appalachia Book Company

“Original, deftly crafted, and an inherently fascinating read from start to finish, Wyatt’s character-driven storytelling style elevates The Watersmith to an impressive level of literary excellence."

—Midwest Book Review

“A wholly unique and lovely work of literary fiction. The Watersmith is an outstanding debut novel. Don’t miss it.”

—Southern Literary Review

“A surprising novel about an underdog’s self-reinvention and the ways in which the dead live on.”

—Foreword Reviews