The Water Knife

By: Paolo Bacigalupi

Narrated by: Almarie Guerra

Length: 14 hrs and 1 min

Publisher's summary

Paolo Bacigalupi, New York Times best-selling author and National Book Award finalist, dives once again into our uncertain future with his first thriller for adults since his multi-award-winning debut phenomenon The Windup Girl.

In the American Southwest, Nevada, Arizona, and California skirmish for dwindling shares of the Colorado River. Into the fray steps Angel Velasquez, detective, leg breaker, assassin, and spy. A Las Vegas water knife, Angel "cuts" water for his boss, Catherine Case, ensuring that her lush, luxurious arcology developments can bloom in the desert, so the rich can stay wet while the poor get nothing but dust.

When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in drought-ravaged Phoenix, Angel is sent to investigate. There he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with no love for Vegas and every reason to hate Angel, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas refugee who survives by her wits and street smarts in a city that despises everything she represents.

With bodies piling up, bullets flying, and Phoenix teetering on collapse, it seems like California is making a power play to monopolize the life-giving flow of a river. For Angel, Lucy, and Maria, time is running out, and their only hope for survival rests in each other's hands. But when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only thing for certain is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink.

©2015 Paolo Bacigalupi (P)2015 Audible Inc.

Critic reviews

"[A]fresh, genre-bending thriller....Bacigalupi weaves an engrossing tale all his own, crackling with edgy style." ( Los Angeles Times)

"An ambitious, genre-dissolving thriller and a timely cautionary tale....this epic, visionary novel should appeal to a wide audience." ( Publishers Weekly)

"There is a savage beauty to the novel, which makes it one of the best books of 2015 I have read so far." ( SFF World)

Compelling story .

I wish the reader didn't mispronounce so many words. That was annoying. Otherwise well read.

Great story... poor narrator...

This story was really good. However the narrator made everyone sound the same... was a bit disappointing. She only had two voices, male and female... too bad this story deserved a better performance.

Nice followup from The Windup Girl

Overall a well written and well delivered story! A few of the scenes didn't sound right to me (the sex sequence where Lucy wanted Angel to choke her & the aftermath of Angel getting the upper hand on the Calis after the hell fire missiles), but maybe it was just the transition from the written to the spoken word.
I was impressed by the Mexican accent of the narrator, but she mispronounced some simple words (granite, chambered, mesa) so it took away from the experience. A few times, the accent disappeared completely and made it confusing following the dialogue.

Great Read! Forward to the Past?

Very much enjoyed the book on multiple levels.
Writing, characters and plot development all realistic.
Global warming / changing environment affecting the U.S. - impacts.
Commentary on viability of communities we have created & their sustainability.
Breakdown of gov. & social structures when pressured.

NOT for age-group readers of Shipbreaker

...excellent exercise on speculative near future...water-rights; unequal repercussions of water-lack and redistribution; immigration and right to free movement between states...descriptive violence, graphic adult sex and pervasive language -not for youthful readers or those not prepared for R-plus or moderate porn (blood or sex)

A sci/fy fiction that has real possibilities.

Any additional comments?

Very timely considering the current drought in the SW US. Starts quickly, a variety of characters, excellent narration, and full of possibilities. The book is depressing in its descriptions of the effects of water shortages and human conditions.

Nonwhite characters shine under a hot sun

The ideas behind this book are extremely intriguing and I really have to give Bacigalupi kudos for trying to get it through our collectively thick skulls that we are destroying our planet and if we don’t do something soon, everything is going to fall apart.

“We’re a species that reacts to visceral stimuli. Whatever those visceral stimuli are, we take that as being the general state of the world. If it’s raining, it’s wet. If it’s a drought, it’s dry. We don’t take in things like ‘statistically, every year Lake Mead has gotten lower and lower.’ That’s not something you experience viscerally.”

That quote from a Locus magazine interview with Bacigalupi (April 2016) pretty much explains what the author wants to accomplish with this book. The characters are placed in the American southwest of a near future where water is getting scarcer every day. Nevada, California and Arizona operate like sovereign states—actually, more like criminal syndicates—that spend most of their time figuring out ways to steal water from each other.

We see this world through the eyes of three main viewpoint characters. Lucy, a Phoenix-based journalist who is investigating the death of a friend who claimed to have found some new water rights. Maria, a refugee from Texas where things are apparently even worse than in Arizona, who is struggling just to get enough money for rent, food and water for the next few days. And Angel, a thug who enforces water rights for his chosen gang, which happens to be the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Anything Bacigalupi writes is head-and-shoulders above most of what gets published, so this was a solid 4 star read for me. His depictions of digitally monitored, Red Cross water stations for the poor and gleaming, waterfall-strewn arcologies for the rich ably contrasted the lifestyles and compromises that would need to be made in a waterless area where the temperature regularly hovers around 120 degrees. The focus on Latino characters and culture was appropriate for the setting and also a welcome break from the usual scifi monotony of whiteness.

However, while reading The Water Knife I didn’t experience the oppressive heat or the unique culture of the American southwest quite as fully as I did the sweltering humidity and rich smells of Bangkok while reading the Windup Girl. More immersive descriptions, more compelling characters and a plot that didn’t get repetitive and kind of predictable at the end would have made it a 5 star read.

[I listened to this as an audio book performed by Almarie Guerra. I liked that she had a hint of a Latino accent but thought she could have given the book a bit more excitement]

Superb world-building, good-ish plot.

Bacigalupi builds a believable near-future, so much so I changed how my pensions are invested. It's some truly awesome futurism. The story in itself is just good, and ironically is a throwback to the hard-boiled stories of yesteryear, and not just because the squabbling over water-rights brings "Chinatown" right into focus, or the MacGuffin might as well have been a Maltese Falcon. Still, highly recommended, and I hope to revisit this world soon, though hopefully only in fiction.

good dystopian story, some extreme violence

I found some of the depictions of extreme violence and torture to be over-the-top, but it didn't keep me from really enjoying this dystopian novel. Most dystopian stories are post-apocalyptic, but what makes this different, and more interesting, IMO, is that this isn't about a catastrophic event that some people manage to live through......This is about a slowly progressive change (continuing drought) that results in incremental changes that ultimately result in an entirely changed landscape and different limits and ways of life. Not just has the climate changed, but so has the architecture, the class system, the job markets, and even the language.

I'm actually surprised this hasn't become a movie yet (with some of the violence toned down). I was pleasantly surprised by the ending too --- didn't see it coming but it was fitting.

The narrator took some getting used to, and even then was only OK.

Kept me on the edge of my feet!

Everytime you thought it was over, something always changed. This isn't normally my genre but I loved it. gives you something to think about while you're entertained.