Underlake
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication date: April 21, 2026
When a mother claims her missing daughter is alive beneath a lake in a flooded valley, a marine biologist descends into a hidden underwater settlement where those who refused to leave have built a sealed-off world—and where the consequences of that choice are beginning to surface.
“In the vein of Margaret Atwood and Emily St. John Mandel, McCoy’s novel is a thoughtful, ethereal story that . . . feels as though it came from the eerie depths it describes.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Mesmerizing . . . Through lightless tunnels and shimmering pools . . . this book illuminates how faith, language, and truth can warp or sharpen under extraordinary pressure.” —Susanna Kwan, author of Awake in the Floating City
“Stunning . . . Achingly true to the human need for hope and forgiveness, Underlakereveals the greatest depths are within the human heart.” —Ron Rash, author of The Caretaker
Thirteen years ago, Otta escaped her small town, determined to become a marine biologist. Now she’s returned, carrying the guilt of a friend’s disappearance during a deep-sea dive and unsure she’ll ever be able to dive again. Then a stranger appears at her door.
This stranger, May, says that her daughter has run away, and insists that she’s under the nearby lake—alive.
To find the missing girl, Otta and May must travel deeper and deeper under the water, confronting webs of fear, control, and delusion borne of a rampant nostalgia for a purer world. Along the way, they will also push their bodies to the mortal limit.
Hypnotic and arresting, Underlake brings a poet’s attention to language, evoking the ethereal work of Marilynne Robinson, Lauren Groff, and Emily St. John Mandel and the imaginative brio of Margaret Atwood. In taking her place as a major new voice in American fiction, McCoy shrewdly explores the American obsession with inheritance, property, and race, asking how we stake our claim on the timeline of history—and who we erase in the process.
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Wrecks
Winner of the Florida Book Award
Finalist for the Noemi Press Book Award
Publisher: Noemi Press
Publication date: Oct. 15, 2025
Wrecks is a collection of poems inspired by the great auk, a flightless seabird driven to extinction in the mid-1800s. The last two known members of the species were killed on Eldey Island, Iceland, in 1844. The auk was repeatedly described by those who killed the bird as making human-like gestures and sounds, including sighs.
Wrecks investigates how the human–nonhuman binary and the dehumanization it enables makes space for violence—against animals and the environment, but also against other humans. It explores the colonial systems that drive extinction, and the hierarchical structure by which hegemonic powers decide what is—and what is not—human.
It engages the author’s experience of dehumanization as an atheist growing up in the conservative South; it also interrogates her complicity in systems of structural racism, and her inheritance as the descendant of colonizers.
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