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SCOTT GOULD is the author of five additional books, including The Hammerhead Chronicles, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction, and Things That Crash, Things That Fly, which won a 2022 Memoir Prize for Books. His other honors include a Next Generation Indie Book Award, an IPPY Award for Fiction, the Larry Brown Short Story Award and the S.C. Arts Commission Artist Fellowship in Prose. His work has appeared in a number of publications, including Garden & Gun. He lives in Sans Souci, South Carolina and teaches at the S.C. Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities.

Peace Like a River weaves a lyrical, heartwarming, often humorous story of fathers and sons and grandfathers…and the tangled boundaries between them…

Set in Lowcountry South Carolina, sixty-something Elwin McClennon returns to the hometown—and the dying father—he fled fifteen years earlier. With Thom, his odd and precocious thirteen-year-old son in tow, Elwin sets out to reconcile with his father and their complicated pasts on the banks of the syrup-slow Black River. He soon finds himself surrounded by an eccentric cast of characters in the town of Kingstree. When Elwin finally dips his paddle in the current on the way to scatter his father’s ashes, he’s unprepared for what the river brings his way. Navigating the emotional journey downriver leads Elwin to surprising truths about his life, his son, and his future.

Peace Like a River is an examination of different shades of love—young love, comfortable love, love gone bad, love still undiscovered. It’s a story of how the past breathes life into the present…and vice versa.